chaos-rampant It was a fortuitous accident that film evolved into a narrative medium. It could have gone down different paths. It started in the hands of its engineers as simple novelty, quickly abandoned - it seemed there was nothing left to discover. Men from the theater saw it as an opportunity to construct a stage and dazzle with effects. People wanted to be told stories though, deep stories about life, and there was money to be made, so that's where it swung to. We lucked out because erudite minds who wanted to work in the new canvas had to puzzle about how it all amounted to a sort of life, create their paintings or music or philosophy in the midst of life. Film as a language would have been tremendously impoverished without this limitation, which is the same one we encounter in life: there is painting or dance only for someone whose senses they strike with curiosity or desire, who has a past and future life that they enliven, in other words a narrative.So we have here a triumph of this language in its struggle to deliver a richer life than usual.It is about dance, wonderful tango. But it can't be just filmed dance, dance itself is more than bodies to music. It is about desire, age, creativity, passion, loss, meaning; all the great dilemmas of life. But they have to be uncovered as life so there needs to be a narrative framework. We want in both cases to find human subjectivity in the dancefloor of its taking shape.The story around these things is about a director who puzzles about a new show and passion in his life. It starts with him on his desk narrating the film we see. It's followed by a hallucination of a male and female pair dancing in a dark soundstage, an old flame we have just seen walk out of his life and her new man. We have some obvious parallels of course: his eye as the camera, his face superimposed on narrative walls. So the point is that when we return to the soundstage the space is already charged with dimensions of memory and mind, internal space where the urges first come to life.The space itself is marvelous and provides endless opportunities to create mind: blank or colored walls, slides and movie clips, painted skies where figures of history emerge from, endless rows of mirrors. We have of course the filmmaker as the protagonist ruminating on lost friends, cruel politics, senseless war and duty to memory. It's his show after all, the broader film, his space of expression. What's so marvelous though is the conflation of inner life into dance. Desire as seeing and settling on her face among many. Couples dancing. Choreographed order. Piercing gazes locked together in tango. A tension that is both affected and yet real just then. Something inscrutable in the air that can only maybe danced out and never quite figured out more. Dance as looking for union.All through the film we see the show take shape, the slow process. In one particularly evocative scene he blows air into empty dresses and this comes alive as inspiration, and this is followed by her stepping out from behind canvas screens to meet him. Soon there's danger that is foreshadowed for the end, an old boyfriend with possibly mob ties who is also funding the show, his heartbreak and loss mirroring the narrator's.So the violence bubbling in the narrator has been merely postponed, what's the resolution?It ends with the lovers' duel sublimated on the stage between dancers, this was a pivotal scene in one of Saura's previous dance films (flamengo there). The whole scene is a masterstroke. The key players looking, immersed, affected. An implicit tension that may be just the show. The dance ending with a knife's flash. The scorned man gets up and yells as if having her stabbed was a thought or an urge that he regretted only too late. (Saura could have made it more clear that the dancer who stabs her was also one of the funder's men, earlier he is seen escorting the girl to a car that has come to pick her up). At this point it may seem like a trivial setup: reality shown to be fiction.But the point is, as all of them walk out of the stage together, reconciled, enthusiastic, casually exchanging words, that all this emotional drama and hurt that was foreshadowed is seen with more distance to be a trivial fiction, an appearance on a stage, an illusion. Wonderful Spanish sensibility.The last shot in context is one of the greatest I've seen, a Marienbad tracking shot through empty space towards glass, tentative reflection that engulfs our vision. Storraro excels all through the film, but here he surpasses himself. It's seen here as clearly as anywhere else that the film is in the company of Resnais, not Bob Fosse.Something to meditate upon.

NICO This movie is one filled with rich artistic value as it contains much dancing and very elegant stage setups. The storyline is one filled with romance and lustfulness which revolves around the main character, his ex-girlfriend, and a young dancer. Therefore, if a viewer is not interested in such aspects, the movie is kind of slow. However, there is reason to recognize the beauty and creativity of many of the scenes in which elegant and complex dances are demonstrated in differently colored and arranged stages. On another note, at times it was a bit confusing to recognize whether a scene was portraying what was going on in the main character's mind or if indeed it was part of the story. In the end however, it felt as if there was no real need to distinguish these scenes as it was all so scattered and spontaneous.

laurel14 Tango may well be the greatest dance movie ever made. Its stunning dance sequences, relentless tango music (orchestrated by Lalo Schiffrin)and throbbing sexuality place this film in a class by itself. There simply has never been anything like it. And, if you have any male hormones left and do not fall immediately head over heels in love with Mia Maestro than something is definitely wrong with you. She is what Audrey Hepburn might have been had Miss Hepburn been Latin and had a spectacular dancer's figure. But the entire cast is wonderful and the lighting and color are explosive. Go see it, then take the next plane to Buenos Aires. I did.

Dr. Michael J. McColley-Parmer While so many have commented on the superlative dancing and the spectacular use of color, this film is not solely about dance. As he did in "Carmen", Carlos Saura invites us into a beautifully crafted melange of realism, impressionism, and surrealism to express the human emotions of love, betrayal, jealousy, fear and redemption. His melange results in a film that is an enigma wrapped in the sensuality, color and passion of a tensive tango that expresses his horror at the atrocities of Argentina's "Dirty War". This film is as much a political statement as it is a well-crafted masterpiece of cinematic art, color and music. In "Carmen" we never know when Antonio's real relationship with Carmen ends and the flamenco drama begins. So too, in "Tango", Saura sucks us into a reality carefully created to deceive us while at the same time it teaches us in colorful shades the subtle and sometimes unnoticeable differences between illusion and reality. Until the end of the film the viewer actually believes that Mario has lost Laura and found himself again in his love for Elena, who he suspects will be murdered by one of LaRocca's henchmen. Saura films the scenes with Elena and Mario at the restaurant and in the bedroom in a colorless reality that assures us that this is a real relationship. Thanks to set designer, Waldo Norman (Ricardo Mourelle), Mario is able to travel between time and space through color, particularly shades of red, giving the dream sequence in which he kills Laura a surreal affect. The devils of Mario's surrealistic subconscious are exorcised again in the graphic choreography of the torture and rape scenes depicting the "Dirty War" against liberals, students, artists, union workers, and intellectuals. In their acrobatic bends, twists and rolls, the dancers give us the impression of intense pain at the hands of their cruel torturers. Perhaps this surreal dance is the only way that Mario, and Saura, can deal with the horrific atrocities inflicted on the thousands of Argentine "desaparecidos" (the disappeared ones) from 1976 – 1983. Mario says as much in the bedroom scene with Elena. While holding her in his arms, Mario states that imagination is the only guardrail that keeps us from plummeting into the depths of horror and atrocity. It is after this scene that the "Repression Tango", Saura's balletic version of the horrors of the "Dirty War" takes place. Having experienced a choreographed impression of Hell, the viewer is jolted back to reality in the end, when Elena awakens from death to ask if she had played the scene of her murder well. The lights are on and the stage is bustling with actors and stage techs. Mario with his arms around Elena seemingly incredulous at her resurrection, realizes that he too for a moment was sucked into the artist's illusion, but now stands redeemed through art in a reality free of his inner-most demons.