Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
February 12–19, 1998
movies
The tango is not portrayed as the usual eruption of hot-blooded passion, but as a clinically pristine ballet.
The Tango Lesson
A coolly observed film about control, compromise and learning to dance.
Written and directed by Sally Potter
A Sony Classics Pictures Release
recommended
You'd be forgiven for confusing Sally, the main character of The Tango Lesson, with the film's director Sally Potter.
After all, Potter plays Sally: an English film director who travels to Buenos Aires as a respite from a script she can't complete, takes up the tango as a means of refocusing her energies, begins a romance with Pablo, her tango instructor, and promises to put him in a movie.
Potter is an English film director (Orlando) who spent time in Buenos Aires, took tango lessons, and had a romance with a tango instructor named Pablo.
And yes, he (Pablo Veron) is in the movie.
Now, cards on the table: I hate movies about making movies (and books about writing books, plays about writing plays, and so on). Writing teachers tell students to write what they know, but there is little as tedious as hearing an artist rattle on about "making art."
And yet I do not hate The Tango Lesson, because for all its similarities to (Potter's) real life, it doesn't feel like a film à clef. Robby Müller's characteristically liquid black-and-white images are more voluptuous than vérité, and Potter's own performance seems almost distracted, as if conscious of being in two places at once. She's been criticized for her low-key acting in this movie, but it's precisely her distance from the role of "Sally" that allows The Tango Lesson to succeed at all. There can be no doubt that this is an intensely personal project—in addition to writing, directing and starring, she co-wrote and sang several of the songs on the film's soundtrack—but it's not an exercise in navel-gazing or self-indulgent catharsis.
Potter's technique here is to avoid changing what doesn't need changing, adapting only the elements necessary to make the story work more smoothly. Rather than constructing a false-front persona to act as a stand-in, Potter puts herself center stage, perhaps as a way of acknowledging that even had the characters been given other names, the story would still have been about her.
Autobiography in The Tango Lesson is mainly a means of simplifying the story. Instead of reinventing her life, Potter edits it, removing details that seem unessential to the story. Sally's London apartment looks more like an abstract theater set than a habitable domicile, and we never do find out much about that film she's supposed to be writing.
The Tango Lesson is also about control, in life and in love. As Sally and Pablo's relationship progresses, they come to realize that neither is capable of allowing the other to lead. He as a dancer and she as a director are used to being in the driver's seat, and neither cares much for constructive criticism. When the accomplished Pablo and his eager pupil enter a dance contest together, he is furious at their performance, and he screams at her: "You should do nothing when you dance! Just follow! Otherwise you destroy my freedom to move!"
In keeping with the movie's understated tone, the tango is not portrayed as the usual eruption of hot-blooded passion, but a clinically pristine ballet, a transfer of power from one to the other. It's only when Pablo dances by himself, clowning around with kitchen utensils or spinning in the rain, that you can feel the joy in his dancing; even though he's performing for Sally, he feels in control. Of course, she's the one watching (and filming) his performance, so which of the two has the upper hand is a matter of perspective.
Not surprisingly, the advertising campaign gets it wrong: "How do you follow when your instinct is to lead?" The more relevant question is how do you neither lead nor follow, but compromise? Sally and Pablo fall in love because each sees in the other a like spirit, indomitable, but also unthreatening, since neither lays claim to proficiency in the other's art. When the lines are crossed—as Sally joins Pablo in his tango, and Pablo tries to get a part in Sally's film—they realize their relationship has no future. "We should sublimate our relationship into our work," Sally tells Pablo, and with The Tango Lesson, that's just what she—or is it Sally Potter?—has done.
