Does it take two to Tango?

June 18, 1998

In an age of nascent equality between the sexes, the issue of who leads when dancing woudn't appear to be one of the more vital skirmishes in the battle. But in this documentary, the sexual politics of Argentina take on a new form - is the woman merely an adornment to the man when dancing the tango, there to add brilliance to the his performance, or does she have a proactive role to play??

In the true indie spirit, filmmaker Adam Boucher, armed with a Hi-8 camcorder, a Steadicam rig and a couple of lights, got on a flight to Argentina still reading the 'how-to' manuals. Three years later, what is obviously a work of laborious obsession - Tango: The Obsession - brought two sold-out houses to the Enzian, filling it with people who would not ordinarily come to a film festival, asking where they could buy the video, surely an indicator of the success of the festival as a means of promoting indie cinema.

Enough of the background b.s. - you're surely asking yourself, well, is it worth seeing? A dozing head next to me, and many "that was just too long" comments belie the fact that this is a 90 minute piece, though I was kept interested. Maybe it was info overload, as this is not only a history of a dance, but a socio-political swathe across a century of gauchos, machismo and the McDonaldization of an increasingly bland and uniform Western world. Tango has evolved from scarcely acknowledged African origins and high society that thought of the dance as obscene, through a world war in which nothing came into the country and the dance's development as an association with two things: nostalgia and displaced immigrant men lamenting being abandoned by women. Nowadays, it's likened to an orgasm - they aren't all the same! - a music that enters through the ears and is transmitted through the heart to the feet, an antidote to the stress of contemporary life.

Clearly, a dance is much more than its form; it's a microcosm of the interaction between the sexes and here, also between generations. The choices of leisure activities might not be so stark nowadays as between the tango and football, but those 3 minutes, holding the woman "like a baby", encompass the history of a nation - "donde estuve, que paso - hay que sentir" (where I was, what happened - you have to feel). It clearly takes more than two to tango.

Peter Lewis
A true African-American, Peter has led a peripatetic lifestle, and after graduating from UCF with a film degree, he is pondering life as another wannabe, devoting his time to working on a novel, his thesis film, a suntan and the dubious benefits of Rogaine.