THE TANGO LESSON (Sally Potter, 1997)

The seventh feature by English filmmaker Sally Potter, who made the gorgeous Orlando (1992), The Tango Lesson is a brilliant musical. The film draws on three of Potter’s passions: humanity, film, and dance. With its self-reflexivity, as Sally the character goes about making a film which in effect becomes The Tango Lesson, the film recalls Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1962), and it has the same exuberance—but not the same abandon. Whereas Fellini’s autobiographical film was almost entirely of the mind and the flesh, Potter’s also includes her heart and soul. Expansively personal, deeply romantic, and (though without dogma or agenda) feminist, the film breathes. It’s aglow with life and spirit.

Central to the film is the Argentinian tango—a sensuous, intricate dance where the woman must be like water to a minutely nuanced breeze; sensitively alert, she must respond to the man’s lead in less than a heartbeat. It isn’t at all like the European version of the tango most of us are more familiar with: angular, staccato. By contrast, the Argentinian tango is all of a dramatic piece.

Incredibly beautiful, this dance nonetheless raises an issue that Potter, a feminist, feels compelled to address—not least of all because Potter herself finds the dance so incredibly beautiful. Is there a way to reconcile this beauty with the dance’s basis, the subordination, hence the submission, of the female to the male?

The dance is new to Sally, whom Potter herself (wonderfully) plays. (I will maintain this distinction of reference: Potter indicates the actual Sally Potter; Sally indicates the character in the film representing her.) Among other things, The Tango Lesson is about experiencing something new, and in such a way that you bring yourself to, not just take from, the experience, transforming it as it transforms you. Sally isn’t simply, passively, trying to learn a dance. She is also trying to teach it a thing or two about her and about gender equality. In this light the film’s title holds a delicious double meaning; Sally’s lesson in the tango is also a lesson for the tango. The “lesson,” then, is a matter of who should not always be leading whom—an issue applicable to many dances, but particularly touchy here, since the whole meaning of the tango is tied up in its masculine bias. By thus striking her own perspective against the rock of a traditional male prerogative, Sally also helps to objectify, for herself, a dilemma of opposite impulses—at once, her desire to “do” the tango, which is, after all, a dance where the male does decisively lead, and her desire somehow to change this in order to make the dance her own. The wide applicability of her quest is clear; male biases are ingrained in many things, many areas, of her Western culture. (Sally is a Londoner.) Is there a way of tossing out the bathwater and not the baby?

Not if her dance instructor has anything to say about it. The dance’s masculine bias suits him just fine; like many a Latino before him, he revels in it. This man takes things as personally as does Sally; in one way or another, he “tangoes” onstage and off. He is a boy, really, twenty years Sally’s junior, and, while he begins as her teacher, he later becomes her professional dance partner. Sally’s love for him coincides with her love of the tango.

The boy’s name is Pablo. In one more Pirandellian stroke of casting, Pablo is played by Pablo Veron, who just happens to have choreographed The Tango Lesson. In his mid-twenties, Pablo Veron is already one of the world’s masters of the tango. The implication comes through (uproariously) clear. Sure, practice makes perfect; but another leg-up for Pablo Veron, so young and so accomplished, is the bias, in his favor, of the culture he was born into.

Potter’s film is as playful as its underpinnings are solid and serious. One of her most remarkable accomplishments is how unerringly she holds in balance the film’s lightness and gravity.

Early on, Potter’s namesake is shown laboring on a script, but with little hope of success, because funding for the film will apparently only be forthcoming if Sally so compromises her vision as to render it generic and foolish. In Paris, both the City of Art and the City of Love, she is blown away by a public performance: two young Argentinian lovers executing a glorious tango. Sally approaches Pablo, entranced, and asks if he gives lessons. Fibbing, the boy says yes. At the first lesson, for which Pablo obviously is unprepared, Sally returns the compliment by fibbing herself; she hasn’t any real experience at dancing, she answers to his query. (In fact, Potter trained as a professional dancer and choreographer at the London School of Contemporary Dance; her first films—shorts—were dance films, and dance, as in the 1983 Gold Diggers, has often played an important role in her film work.) This lovely exchange of fibs shows how much these two want to come together; it’s a way for them to negotiate the gulf—in age and ethnicity, and the attendant social awkwardness—between them. Sally wants to make love with the boy; Pablo is wondering if he can end up in a movie of Sally’s. (The ego! Isn’t he already celebrity enough?) The two keep secret their desires.

The Tango Lesson—the film itself—sublimates the lovemaking that, at least in the film, Sally and Pablo don’t consummate. More precisely, it is the tango in the film that points to this sublimation. The breakup of Pablo’s partnership with Sally’s predecessor causes the boy to shy away from so soon again mixing art and romance, thus freeing him to groom Sally to be his new partner (only) for the stage. The two plunge into rehearsal.

Something astonishing happens. Wistfulness, dissatisfaction, yearning—one expects a substantial measure of these to emanate from the gap between the dance the two rehearse and the sex they fail to have. But only imposing these on the film from the burden of one’s expectation will likely lead one to finding them in more than a trace amount in Potter’s film. In other words, the sublimation is very nearly complete, with only a spillover here and there owing to the dance’s heady eroticism, from which Sally and Pablo always quickly withdraw to maintain the integrity of their partnership. We watch content, undisturbed by the prickings of the heart more sentimental films have given us. Feelings of “Oh, if only—!” do not cross or vex us here; the dance does not come in a poor second. And from this arises a captivating idea: sex as the sublimation of art to the same degree that art sublimates sex. The quip can’t be far behind: Art—“sex” without the disparity in gender equality.

It is against such inequality that Potter’s film stands in such delightful protest. And the inequality is as pervasive here as it is outside the film. There are those, for instance, who presume to tell Sally how she should (drastically) change the film she has in mind to make in order to make the result more “commercial”—that is, less personal, less genuine, less Sally’s. It’s silly; these people want Sally to make the film, but they won’t allow her to make her film—as though there were any other film she should want to make. And, although they present themselves as making helpful suggestions (and ones, plainly, they have no idea are idiotic), these people in control of the project’s purse-strings are actually dictating to Sally. They’re aiming at squeezing the soul out of her film. Therefore, she chucks the project and moves on to the film-within-the-film that (by merging our two distinct Sallys) becomes The Tango Lesson.

Does the title, then, suggest a third meaning? A lesson to other filmmakers to stick to their vision, to express themselves in their work?

Potter, let me tell you, doesn’t give such short shrift to Pablo Veron as Pablo, in the film, gives to Sally. Her film, a thing of equality, gives full and generous measure to Veron’s choreographic contribution. A self-centered filmmaker would have rewritten reality in order to indulge in self-flattery; Potter, on the other hand, makes no attempt to conceal the fact that, as a tango dancer, Pablo’s first partner far exceeds his second. I am reminded here of the sparkler Easter Parade (Charles Walters, 1948), where Judy Garland’s inferiority, as dancer, to Ann Miller is written into the plot involving their characters, thus relieving us of the uneasiness we certainly would feel had the film, because Garland was the star, pretended otherwise. And, needless to say, Potter is even less motivated to conceal the fact that Sally the dance pupil will never match, much less exceed, her teacher and partner. The film gives the devil his due.

Pablo, in the film, is another matter. He is neither fair nor generous. Young, arrogant and macho, he isn’t looking for an equal partner in anyone with whom he dances (or does anything else), least of all in Sally. On the contrary, the fact that he begins as her instructor seems (wrongly) to assure him that Sally will always follow his lead, which indeed she tries her best to do, much as she—pupil to tutor, older woman to younger man—slips into an attitude of reliance on his opinion of her, the un(wo)manning of her self-assurance. We take such hints of her uncharacteristic subservience as as index of her grazed professional confidence following the collapse of the earlier film project—the money would have been nice—and of her being bowled over by the beauty of both the boy and his Argentinian dance. (Potter anticipates these upheavals, visually, by showing Sally’s London flat, literally, coming apart at the beams.) But Sally is still, somewhere, Sally. Her own nature subtly, perhaps unconsciously, opposes the male domination the tango requires; and, when Pablo, the oaf, after their first public performance tears into her for not having perfectly followed his lead, failing even to acknowledge—partly because his different cultural mind-set hides it from his view—her arduous attempt to please him, Sally, restored, snaps back, questioning the inequality of the dance upon which Pablo’s masculine pride so clearly relies. The two (sort of) reconcile; but we are left, as are Sally and Potter, with a conundrum of claims: the entrancing beauty of form, the rigor of form, and what this rigor requires of us; our independence, and our reliance on others; the negotiation of equal gender relations when in fact, as in Sally’s relationship with Pablo, equality isn’t even equally shared as a desirable goal. The airy demeanor and mature sensibility of this marvelous film help us to sort out this tumble of claims and counterclaims.

Much of the film’s beauty reaches us through its visual aspect. For one thing, the dancing is magical. Too, the film is the most wondrous instance of black-and-white lensing since Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). Light at its loveliest—at its lightest—appears to float through spontaneous images, helping Potter to disclose a world of creativity, possibility, inspiration—a world of learning a dance or of imagining a film. Magical also, then, is the contribution made to the film by one of the world’s greatest cinematographers, Robby Müller, who dreamily facilitated Wenders’ masterpiece, In the Course of Time (1976). That The Tango Lesson possesses such free-flowing life, liquidity and buoyancy suggests that Müller and Potter, rare collaborators, on a dance floor in their minds have found a way to dance an equal tango.

THE FIFTH REACTION (Tahmineh Milani, 2003)

As in her earlier Do zan (Two Women, 1999), in Tahmineh Milani’s Vakonesh panjom Niki Karimi plays a woman named Fereshteh who represents socially and politically oppressed Iranian womanhood. This is a better film.
     Fereshteh has just been widowed. Her “first reaction,” then, is grief. The film opens with her at a restaurant with four sister teachers, who have taken her out in an effort to cheer her up. Fereshteh’s “second reaction,” then, is communality. Announcing that he is “the law,” her father-in-law, Sadfar, informs Fereshteh that his son’s death annuls the marriage and he will be assuming responsibility for raising his two grandsons. The possibility of such an outcome generates Fereshteh’s “third reaction”: anxiety; a feeling of helplessness. The first three reactions contribute to the generation of the fourth: hopeful action. Fereshteh and her sister teachers hatch a plan for her escape to Dubai with her children. With Sadfar in hot pursuit, the car chase is on. Sadfar, alas, catches up with Fereshteh and has her thrown into an utterly dark jail cell; but the deceased’s brother makes a pointed appeal that makes Sadfar ready to compromise; before he is able to state the “one condition” that will entitle Fereshteh to freedom and reunion with her children (which we can easily guess), the closing freeze frame discloses Fereshteh’s “fifth reaction”: despair, hopelessness, even terror. (Sadfar isn’t in the frame; the enormous shadow of his finger on the cell wall trumps the cowering Fereshteh down below, on the floor.) Even as Sadfar somewhat relents, the shot reconfirms the disadvantage that persists for Fereshteh and other Iranian women.
     I like that Sadfar isn’t made out a villain. Milani shows how reasonable he thinks he is being. Fereshteh: “He’s not such a bad person; but stubborn.”

THE MAN BY THE SHORE (Raoul Peck, 1993)

The Man by the Shore is about Haiti, where its maker, Raoul Peck, served briefly as Minister of Cultural Affairs until he resigned in 1997. Peck himself was born in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, in 1953, but he and his family, fleeing the dictatorship of François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier, moved to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) when he was eight years old after his father secured a teaching post there. Peck’s highschooling was completed in France, after which he studied industrial engineering, economics, and filmmaking in Germany. In between his German studies, Peck visited the United States. Peck has homes in Paris, Port-a-Piment in southwest Haiti, and Voorhees, New Jersey.

The Man by the Shore, whose script Peck and André Graill co-authored, draws upon Peck’s own childhood memories of a frightening, brutal place where his father was arrested twice and many others contesting the government “were disappeared,” that is, made to disappear, that is, murdered. However, the film’s protagonist isn’t an eight-year-old boy but an eight-year-old girl named Sarah (Jennifer Zubar). (Sarah has two sisters.) On one occasion when the child is being routinely intimidated by the local military/police “chief,” Sarah, standing, wets the floor. I can understand the welter of feelings that might prompt Peck to identify his boyhood self in that terrifying environment with a girl instead; but I can also understand objections to this procedure.

One of the film’s indisputable achievements, however, is the integrity of Sarah’s childhood that it conveys despite all. Peck knows the difference between showing us one of Duvalier’s vicious Tontons Macoutes terrorizing Sarah and brutalizing the character himself. Peck appropriately distances everything we see—so much so, in fact, that when at the last Janvier, the Macoute, meets his own brutal end, not a single drop of glee rises in our hearts. Peck is not a sentimentalist; we watch Janvier’s end in pitiless horror and some relief, knowing full well that Duvalier will promptly replace Janvier with another one of his soulless army of Tontons Macoutes. Peck has devised his film, then, so that we take in an environment of daily political terror, through incidents large and small, rather than react to a cardboard melodrama that manipulates our emotions. Peck grasps that he can’t be credible arguing how certain regimes seek to dehumanize ordinary people if, as a sensationalist filmmaker, he himself is dehumanizing the characters who represent these ordinary people.

Above all, he employs the resources of cinema to achieve the distancing necessary to create a portrait of the social and political environment that we can think about rather than simply react to. In this regard, Janvier’s murder constitutes one of the film’s finest accomplishments—a masterful scene because it’s a masterful shot. We watch Sarah hide a pistol on her person, knowing that her father has taught her how to use a pistol. We see her and one of her sisters ride to the shore on their bicycles, all but inviting Janvier to mess with them. Janvier does, pulling Sarah’s older sister by the hair in order to rape her, and Sarah, her armed hand in closeup, retaliates. There is a click; no discharge. A second click fires; Janvier, in medium shot, falls to the ground dead. The camera moves screen-left to record the girls’ stunned escape; the camera, this time stunning us, moves screen-right to reveal that someone else, Gracieux (Patrick Rameaux, in a haunting performance), the girls’ godfather, whom Janvier earlier sexually brutalized with his thick stick, delivered the lethal shot. Gracieux, as gentle as Sarah and nearly as innocent, has been perverted into becoming a killer, as she might have been perverted into becoming a killer. A Brechtian filmmaker, Peck has his filmmaking bible: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), where everything breaks and turns on who really does the shooting that we first think someone else did. Ford, too, devised a brilliant shot to show us who killed the villain, with the camera then moving to reveal who really did the killing. Peck’s film isn’t quite so momentous; the history of a nation doesn’t hinge on the widened knowledge that is disclosed to the audience with a movement of the camera, as happens in the Ford. Peck knows this; he also knows that his reduced application of Ford’s strategy yields a more intimate result.

The sisters have been all but orphaned. Their parents fled for their lives once Duvalier was in power. The children’s grandmother, Mme. Desrouilliere, is in charge of them; her righteously rebellious spirit underscores how powerless people are to oppose Duvalier and his minions. Duvalier’s local authorities dole out injustice with unqualified and vicious authority.

If there’s a better film than Peck’s for revealing to audiences what living in a police state is precisely like, I don’t know what it might be. (Compare this valuable film to Guillermo del Toro’s worthless Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006, about Franco’s Spain.) The Man by the Shore isn’t just recommended viewing. It’s essential viewing.

SARABAND (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)

Below is an old e-mail that I sent friends a few years back, retrieved for me by one of its recipients:

Distracted by the unhappy news that that dreadful Crash is Oscar-bound, I forgot to do two things: wish you all a happy Friday the Thirteenth, with all the gore your dripping hearts desire, and tell you about Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband, which I watched last night (on DVD). Saraband is writer-director Bergman’s thirty year-later sequel to his Scenes from a Marriage—a film, I daresay, we have all seen more than once.
     Saraband has its lovely moments, and a performance by Liv Ullmann—an actress who is no favorite of mine—that is wonderful. Although Ullmann continues to be humorless and (but now only a tad) sanctimonious, this is easily the warmest, sharpest performance she has given. If you, like me, usually get creeped out by The Ullmann, you shouldn’t necessarily avoid Saraband—an exceptionally easy Bergman film to watch, as Bergman films go. The Ullmann has improved with age.
     Alas, the film is not without its Bergmaniacal cruelties—for instance, a father and son who each tells the other how much he hates him: you know—the sort of thing that warms Bergman’s heart but chills and depresses the rest of us. Nothing else in the film, with the exception of a few dazzlingly directed moments, rises to the level of Ullmann’s performance. But, for the most part, the film is enjoyable as half-mellowed Bergman. So dust off your old Bergmania, draw down a bottle of bourbon, and indulge. The DVD includes a “Making of . . .” documentary that even allows one to spend a little time with The Man himself.
     And, if you adore The Ullmann, as I know some of you do, you will probably have the time of your life. Oh, by the way, you will also get to see The Ullmann naked (what she won’t do for her long-ago partner!)—but, to get to that vision (lookin’ good, old girl!), you will also have to see Erland Josephson, now in his eighties, naked as well. All this unexpected nudity occurs in the chapter titled “Hour of the Wolf.” No comment.

MACHUCA (Andrés Wood, 2004)

September 11. On that day in 1973, a violent coup d’état took place in Chile, backed by the pathological U.S. presidency of Richard Nixon and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and Allende, abandoned by Leftist supporters tending to their own safety, apparently (though dubiously) killed himself when he no longer could defend the presidential palace. Thus ended 46 years of constitutional government in Chile. Upon taking office in 1970, President Allende, a socialist, had befriended Cuba’s Fidel Castro and nationalized U.S. companies in Chile. Including Pinochet, the four-man right-wing junta that replaced Allende gave the extermination of Marxism as one of its principal goals. Political activity was banned; parliament, suspended; dissidents, murdered. Pinochet eventually restored constitutional government, becoming Chile’s president for an eight-year term beginning in 1981. He had already agreed that his successor would be a civilian.

Machuca, a Chilean film with additional funding from Spain, France and the United Kingdom, takes us back to September 11. Three children—two boys and a few-years-older girl—are eyewitnesses to history. The boys, Gonzalo Infante and Pedro Machuca, are pupils at a Church-run private school in Santiago. Gonzalo is there by dint of family wealth and class, but Pedro, rechristened Peter, is one of a half-dozen scholarship students—natives; Indians—from the adjacent slums. Thanks to Father McEnroe, who is egalitarian, students like Pedro are being admitted to St. Patrick’s, which teaches English, for the first time. Across the barrier of class, Gonzalo and Pedro become friends, each becoming the other’s protector at school. Silvana, Pedro’s cousin, helps inaugurate the sexual education of the two eleven-year-olds, and both she and Pedro introduce Gonzalo to Leftist street agitation. The children’s world is ripped apart by Pinochet’s bloody coup. The military take over the school, deposing the priests, including Father McEnroe. No longer is the boys’ friendship tenable. In “Shantytown,” Silvana is murdered in front of Gonzalo by the raiding and rioting military police. “Look at me!” Gonzalo shouts at the officer who grabs him—meaning, “Look at me: I’m white!” He takes off on his bicycle for his posh home, haunted for the rest of his life.

The film itself testifies to the degree that “Gonzalo” has remained haunted, since the film is semi-autobiographical and Gonzalo is based on Andrés Wood, one of the co-authors of the script and the director of the film. Moreover, Machuca is dedicated to the memory of the actual head of St. Patrick’s, 1969-1973—the character on whom Father McEnroe is based. But, of course, movie memories are mixed in with the other memories. Father McEnroe, beautifully played by Ernesto Malbran, cannot help but remind us, at least a little, of Don Pietro Pellegrini, the heroic priest in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945); and over all the scenes at school, especially at the last, hangs the aura of Louis Malle’s Au revoir, les enfants (1987). Wood’s film is not as trenchant as Rossellini’s, to be sure, but neither is it as sentimental and fanciful as Malle’s convenient revision of his own history during the Occupation of France. Nor does Wood’s film, in an odious melodramatic frenzy, bash the poor and the working class as does Malle’s regrettable film.

For the most part, the filmmaking is conventional, at times, formally uninteresting, and much too much footage is taken over by Gonzalo’s mother’s extramarital affair, which bears no political resonance that I can discern. I like the film’s balanced quality; for instance, the economic wobbliness of Allende’s Chile is frankly acknowledged. But nearly everything comes together with great power in the film’s final movement. From the climax—the coup—onward, the film is hallucinatory, fierce, surreal, a stunning depiction of how children would see and, when no longer children, remember such tumultuous events. Suddenly the filmmaking becomes peerless. When Gonzalo rides his bicycle away from “Shantytown,” furiously, for the last time, a closeup of his peddling feet continues on upward to create an image of the boy’s expanded size correlative to the enormity of his fears and to his widened political awareness, both at the moment and in retrospect. In this last movement, then, Wood’s film enters the territory of John Ford, with its double sense of time, the event in both the moment and in memory.

I was not entranced by this film every shot of the way; but it delivers. I understand it is also the first fictional Chilean film to address this part of Chile’s past. Perhaps it is a mixed bag, but that is no reason not to see it.

Machuca won a number of best film prizes at Latin American film festivals.