Purely Joyful Movie!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

I writing this review as much for people who watched this movie already as for people interested in watching it: this is not a movie about tango.This is, first of all, a movie about the making of a show. Many people seem to let this information escape, but we're subtlety informed about this from the very beginning. We're presented with the long process that goes in the head and daily work of director Mario. It's somehow a lesson of direction.Second to this, the show being made is about Argentinian life. It's a story of birth, passion, illusion, violence, betrayal, forgiveness and rebirth. And it's a very dense and beautiful story.And how is this story shown to us? It's shown by the way of tango, which then takes the central part of the movie.Having told that, now I hope you may let yourself being involved by this movie and watch it differently. And that you really enjoy the masterful work Saura has done to give you this absolutely beautiful movie. His direction of camera, light, music and actors is simply stunning. I truly believe this movie puts him side-by-side with the great ones like Kurosawa or Kubrick.

One of my best friends is from an old Kentucky family. He is a nephew of the historic statesman, Henry Clay (I forget how many "greats" are in front of "nephew"), knows as much about wine as the monks who came up with Dom Perignon, and has traveled widely. However, while he is supremely confident, he's unpretentious, and still has the "good ol' boy" persona - despite a cultured background - and is blunt is his assessment of things. This movie was on t.v. while I was visiting him - a large 4- or 5-foot h.d. set - and he reluctantly watched it with me, at my request. Afterwards he said he had unexpectedly enjoyed it, and his summation was, "Damn, those Argentinians can sure as hell dance." We get so caught up sometimes in over-analyzing movies and plays, writing slobbering rhetoric about the deep message, the artful presentation, clever filming, hidden meanings, "stories-within-stories," and on and on and on.Let's just say this is an excellent film with excellent music, the actors and characters are engaging, the camera work interesting, and finally, "those Argentinians can sure as hell dance!"

This big failure is one of the worst and arrogant movies ever produced. People should realize that in Argentina the film was repudiated by both the audience and the public.Tango produced much, much better movies.Carlos Saura, Lalo Schiffrin and Vittorio Storaro made good films... but this is their worst. A superficial look at an Argentinean phenomenon. The whole story... there is no story: it is a superficial view of the Buenos Aires music produced by executives with a complete ignorance of the issue.Frankly, this film should be shelved and never exhibited again.

There's a scene in "Some Like it Hot" in which Jack Lemmon dances a tango with Joe E. Brown. The tune is a famous one, La Cumparasita or something like that, turned into an American pop song in the 1950s with English lyrics and named "Strange Sensations." Anyway, the dance is played for laughs. Well, it's understandable. The conventions of the tango seem so automated to someone used to other forms. But what surprised me here was the flexibility of the form, the way it is adapted to circumstances. There is, of course, a number here in which two or three dancers express intense passion, the emotion we usually associate with the tango. But there is also a number that is informed by humor. Suarez, who is about to direct a show featuring the tango, native to Argentina, is alone in his studio, talking to himself about the folly of falling in love, and he imagines a scene in which the silhouettes of two dancers perform a comic number, waggling their bottoms at the camera, the music bumping along in the background featuring a few strings and a flatulating tuba, itself an amusing instrument in sound and appearance. Thank you for that tuba, Lalo Schifrin. As an Hispanic himself, Schifrin knows what he's doing. (He makes good use of the bandoneon, a kind of concertina, too.) There is a less-successful number that uses boots and military uniforms in an evocation of the period in the 1970s and 1980s when citizens of Argentina were "disappeared." There are tango-tinged encounters between men and others involving women, that are homosexual in effect. And sometimes there is no music behind the dances at all -- only the natural sounds of clothing rustling and soles squeaking on the wooden floor as the performers twist and turn. Let me get back to that homosexual dance between the two women. One of them, if I got it right, is Suarez's ex wife, a superb dancer played by Cecilia Narova. The younger one is played by Mia Maestro. The dance ends with a sensuous kiss, and I can understand why another woman might want to kiss Maestro. I could understand it even if some twisted extraterrestrial whose native notion of esthetic perfection looked like the inside of an alarm clock wanted to kiss Maestro. She is egregiously beautiful, two-thirds Diane Venora and one third Audrey Hepburn, and sports what must be, even to the most jaded eye, a nearly perfect body whose movements are entirely under her own control. Her high kicks beat those of Eleanor Powell. And when her numbers freeze in tableaux, it would be perfectly okay if she just retained those balletic poses for, oh, say five or six minutes so we can burn the images into our brains. I don't think the human form and the suppleness of which it is capable has ever been displayed more elegantly. Not to put down Fred and Ginger. That's a different ballroom game.The Spanish as spoken is appropriately Argentinian too, for what it's worth. The pronunciation is regional and so is the grammar. I say this out of complete ignorance of the language except for that which comparative linguists tell us. And a chat buddy in Buenos Aires. (Besos a vos, mi compaera).The plot is nothing much. Abstract and arty and colorful. Saura's 8 1/2. Suarez, the benign director of a musical show, falls for Maestro. She is living with a Mafioso who is a dangerous dude, sub specie aeternitatus. But she tells the Mafioso off anyway and stalks off as he shouts after her -- "You're making a big mistake." If it did turn out to be a mistake we don't learn about it. The movie ends happily if trickily.I want to emphasize that the dances are just about everything here. They bear about the same relationship to Lemon and Brown's tango as Fred and Ginger's superbly rehearsed dances do to the twist. There is one number by Maestro in which she does nothing but walk around slowly and strike an occasional pose. It's stunning in it simplicity and sensuousness. And in the duets, the dancers hold each other so close through so many acrobatic movements that, without stretching too much, I can imagine one false step bringing them tumbling to the floor wrapped up in each other.The photography and lighting (by Vittorio Storaro) is superlative and the art direction equally so. Everything takes place in a carefully designed studio with mirrors and stages and painted backdrops scattered around. Sometimes we don't know if we're looking into a mirror or seeing the "real" scene. Nor can we always be sure that what we're watching is taking place in "real" life or in Suarez's imagination -- sometimes the imaginary turns into the real. But none of this detracts from our understanding of the film. The "double" structure is not simple directorial self display, nor is it just more hokum about "what's reality and what's illusion?". It adds visual texture to a film that already has more than a dozen Hollywood monstrosities could hold. It's really art, without quotation marks around it.