Tango

There's something about the tango that seems to bring out the introverted, arty and pretentious in film-makers: witness Sally Potter's self-indulgent The Tango Lesson. Here writer/director Carlos Saura's moody but monotonous tale of Mario, an Argentinian theatre director, strives to give the tango some sort of social significance. His efforts at integrating rhythms and visuals gradually come to mirror Mario's midlife crisis, his troubles with women, even his feelings of political repression. Fifteen years earlier, Saura's Carmen had attempted something similar, but had blended its rhythms and blues more successfully. There, you really felt flamenco-ed. Here, you don't really feel tango-ed at all.