Shall we dance?
Oops, wrong movie. It’s getting difficult to keep track of all the hoofers pounding the boards in movies and videos these days, what with all the bashful Japanese ballroom students, Irish high-steppers, jitterbugging yuppies and Vegas showgirls.
Actually, we’ve come to the Chateau Marmont, that stately celebrity haunt just off the Sunset Strip, to discuss “The Tango Lesson” with Sally Potter. The British writer-director is in town to promote her highly personal new film, in which she’s also able to showcase her considerable dancing and acting skills.
“The Tango Lesson,” which opened Friday at the Music Box, is just the latest of several high-profile projects related to the exotic Argentinian dance to arrive on the scene. The others include the touring shows, “Tango X 2” and “Forever Tango”; concerts and recordings by classical artists Yo Yo Ma and Gidon Kramer; and the already released soundtrack to Potter’s movie, which provides an intriguing sampling of contemporary tango music.
This month, Chicago’s Facets Video is releasing “Tango: Our Dance,” Jorge Zanada’s fascinating documentary study of the tango, the possibility of the dance’s extinction and the role the it has played in the national psyche of Argentina.
The cinema’s fascination with the sultry dance goes back to the days of Rudolph Valentino. While the release of “Forbidden Dance,” in 1990, probably helped kill off another South American export, the lambada, Potter hopes American audiences will go out and find her film, and embrace it as they did “Shall We Dance?,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “The Turning Point,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Swingers” and “Strictly Ballroom.”
The appeal of dance, she believes, is bred in the bone.
“First, everybody’s a dancer . . . we hear and we move . . . we were dancing before we were born,” Potter suggests. “You don’t need anything to dance, except your own body and the rhythm of your heartbeat. In late adolescence, however, people become self-conscious, and they start saying things like, `I’d like to dance, but I’ve got two left feet.’ “
In “The Tango Lesson,” the 47-year-old London native plays a frustrated filmmaker who abandons her commercial project, “Rage,” to pursue a small independent picture based on the dance. The director (also named Sally) becomes obsessed with the tango after she begins taking lessons from a young Argentinian, Pablo (Pablo Veron, a star of “Tango Argentino” and Alfredo Arias’ “Mortadella”), while both are working in Paris.
Under his tutelage, Sally eventually becomes proficient enough to perform in dance competitions in Europe and Buenos Aires. In turn, she offers him an opportunity to star in her movie.
To achieve success in disciplines previously unfamiliar to both of them, however, each artist must accept the other’s dominance. This reversal of roles ultimately causes the dilemma at the heart of the film.
“In the tango, there’s only one leader and one follower,” Potter explains. “There’s a division of labor, without which the dancers would be going in opposite directions. Likewise, in cinema, there’s only one director.
“What I tried to bring out in the story was the exchange of roles, the fact that Pablo’s character leads me in the tango and that I have to learn to surrender to that lead. Then, he has to learn to surrender to my lead in order for our film to be made.”
Finally, she suggests, “It becomes a mutual surrender to something that’s bigger than both of them, actually.”
Veron–who never before acted in a film–has long dark hair, a neatly trimmed beard, a chest festooned with silver chains and the bearing of an athlete. He provides the perfect contrast–in person and on screen–to the pale and willowy Potter, who’s blessed with a full head of red hair and an aggressive intellect.
“In the tango, there is one who follows and one who leads,” Veron says, through an interpreter. “It’s the man who’s proposing and the woman who is in the necessary state of receptivity.”
He humbly disagrees with Potter’s assertion that a film director and the lead dancer in the tango both wield the same authority.
“To make a film, everyone has their own role and we listen to each other,” he observes. “It’s not just that one leads and the other follows–each one has to listen to the other.
“I don’t feel that my character gives up something. There’s an exchange that’s finally very productive.”
Potter won’t say exactly where she separated drama from autobiography in “The Tango Lesson.” But it’s easy to imagine that some of the characters’ creative differences might have been drawn from real life.
The tango leaves room for improvisation, but not democracy.
“Of all the couple dance forms, the tango occupies a very specific place,” Potter explains. “It’s the most intimate. It’s the most close-hold dance, with the most rapid-fire and complex leg movements, and the richest vocabulary in which people can improvise.
“It’s an endlessly expanding dance, where there’s room for expressing the extremes of movement and the extremes of emotion–from intimacy to separation, from melancholy to joy.”
The tangos shown in the movie derive from the traditional Argentine school of the dance.
Born in the crowded working-class salons of turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, this interpretation demands more control than the flamboyant style made popular on stage in the ’80s. The couples appear absorbed in the music and each other, and improvise off a basic vocabulary of moves.
“From the very first time I saw tango, I appreciated this capacity of improvisation,” says Veron, who became a dancer at 9. “It wasn’t the big show or spectacular quality that interested me. It was to be able to exercise freedom and improvisation, as you looked deeper into the technique of the dance.
“The concentration is meditative, opening us up to what the music is telling us. I think the tango is well used in film, because the camera can capture more of the subtlety and inner qualities, which is the real state of the dance.”
On the other hand, he adds, “In the theater we fall into this stereotype of the passionate tango. It’s not really the original sense of the dance . . . that happened when it traveled and with Valentino. The Argentine tango is very sober.”
That’s not to say, however, that “The Tango Lesson” doesn’t add some new wrinkles of its own. One memorable scene describes the creation of a tango that requires Sally to interact with three men simultaneously.
“The Tango Lesson” is Potter’s first film since the 1992 release of her highly ambitious and critically acclaimed “Orlando.” Based on a Virginia Woolf novel, it tells the story of an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for four centuries and changes genders halfway through his journey.
She explains away the gap in productivity by pointing out, “If you’re a writer-director, you can’t just go from one thing to another, you have to keep going back to the invention process.”
After spending six months promoting “Orlando,” she wrote seven screenplays. One of these was “Rage,” the thriller seen abandoned in “The Tango Lesson.”
Potter acknowledges that her decision to write, direct and star in the picture could be construed as being self-indulgent.
“This story, it seemed to me, had to be told from the inside out,” Potter insists.
“To make a film about the tango, I needed to use genuine Argentinian tango dancers, who have not acted before. So, to avoid many of the traps of overacting, I had to create roles that were versions of themselves.
“To put an actress into that could jeopardize the ensemble feeling of risk, exposure and semi-reality.”
She says she considered casting another actress as Sally, but, after conducting screentests of herself, “I couldn’t find anyone else who was English, to make the maximum contrast with the Latin American culture; about my age, to be therefore believable as a film director who has real experience behind her; and had already danced tango at a semi-professional level, which I had done with Pablo by this time.
“It was as if all the roads were pointing in the same direction.”
Potter found that her character’s journey required “falling in love with the dance, with the culture and with the act of risk-taking itself. For an outsider to understand the tango, you can’t stay at the surface.”
At the beginning, she continues, “I had no intention of making a film about the tango, anyway. I was just pursuing the dance as a private passion, but it gradually took me over. . . .”
The filmmaker is convinced that “The Tango Lesson” will appeal equally to dance enthusiasts and wallflowers. What she wasn’t so sure of was how the film–and her dancing–would play in the home of the tango.
“To my great relief the response among Argentinians has been overwhelmingly positive,” she said, even before the film won top prize at last month’s Mar del Plata film festival in Argentina. “As an outsider, I’m working with their tango and I never wanted to propose that I’m an expert on the subject, or anything besides somebody with a great curiosity and respect for the form.”
Veron, who grew up on the tango and, for nearly a decade, has been its ambassador in Europe, remains skeptical.
“We’ll see, but I think it will be difficult,” he said. “Sally, of course, is not Argentinian. So, we’ll just have to wait.”
