"The Tango Lesson" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL February 7, 1998 Sally Potter is one of the most respected names in feminist film. >From her brilliant early "theory film" _Thriller_, that deconstructed the tragic romantic love story exemplified by _La Boheme_ and retold it as a murder mystery in which the doomed heroine seeks to discover why it was she had to die and who killed her, to her more recent big budget, oppulent and intelligent filming of Virginia Woolf's _Orlando_, she seems never to have made a film that wasn't original and fascinating. And despite what you may have read in the local papers, her new film, _The Tango Lesson_, while very different from any of her earlier work, is just a full and rich as her earlier work. This is the first time we've had a chance to see Sally Potter attempt a really personal film. All films, of course (even documentaries), are fabricated to one degree or another, so, short of being a personal confidante of Sally Potter it's impossible to know to what extent this film is autobiographical. But Potter does everything she can think of here to make the audience believe that this is a highly autobiographical piece indeed. She plays the leading role "Sally Potter," a British filmmaker, herself and the other leading character, a dancer named Pablo Veron, is played by a dancer named Pablo Veron. Furthermore, in the film "Sally Potter" learns to dance the tango so well that she can perform at a near professional level as a dancer, and it's very clear that it is the actor Sally Potter who is doing the dancing in the film and not some double. And to top it off, in the film the character Sally Potter, after giving up plans to do another Hollywood film in the colorful, opulent style of _Orlando_, decides to make a more personal film, about the tango, that will feature Pablo Veron and a couple of his Argentinian dancer friends, which, of course, this film does. Like all Potter films, this one works on many different levels. I took my elderly mother to see it and she thought it was wonderful just because she loves ballroom dancing, though she was totally oblivious to any of its other dimensions, including its feminist politics, its portrait of a filmmaker at work, its exploration of the dangers of mixing your personal and professional lives, older woman/younger man relationships, the role of Jewishness in the lives of these two creative people, and the meaning of the tango, that most dramatic and macho of all ballroom dances. (Why shouldn't it be macho since it was originally a dance for male partners, presumably gauchos out on the Pampas). And Sally Potter is not the only feminist filmmaker to have been captivated by the tango. German feminist filmmaker Jutta Brueckner, too, made a film called "Ein Blick und die Liebe bricht aus...." (unfortunately never released in the U.S.) about the tango, as well. Besides the dancing, which is, indeed wonderful, and Sally Potter's own superb director's eye for just the right shot, the right location, the right mood, what fascinated me most about the film was, first, the interplay of power relationships between Sally and Pablo. The male domination inherent in the tango comes to the fore in a dramatic scene after they have performed publicly together for the first time and he accuses her of ruining his ability to dance, not because she had made any mistakes in the steps, but because she exerted too much will of her own onstage when his ability to dance to the height of his powers requires his female partner to do nothing, to totally subordinate her will to his and be like an object in his arms. Once they get over the enormous row that that causes, the tables turn when Sally decides to make a film about the tango and Sally is the director. When Pablo says he may not want to do this or that scene, she tells him she'll find another dancer. The film is the thing, and she's in charge now. One wonders how it all came out, what their relationship is now, after the film has been made, for it wasn't really clear that Pablo could deal with that very well. I also loved Potter's homage to all those scenes in all those Hollywood musicals of the '40s and '50s in which the lovers/dance partners ended up dancing in the streets of Paris, along the Seine. Potter finds ingenious ways of making that happen "in reality" in her film a couple of times--once with the requisite Hollywood fake snow (or are they blossoms?) falling on their heads as the dance ends. This delightful feminist film, "The Tango Lesson," is playing, oddly enough, only at The Movies at Mission Bell in Tampa and The Movie s at Pinellas Park. I think they should be encouraged and supported in their willingness to bring such offbeat and interesting films to the Bay area. After our local boycritics slammed "The Tango Lesson" as "boring" and "self indulgent" (translation: the leading woman is not a "babe) I hope that the women who will appreciate this film will make it a point t go see it. There were only seven people in the audience when I saw it a and it really deserves a bigger audience. Copyright 1998. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.