['Our Last Tango" Trailer (English)]
I saw the trailer on Facebook some time ago, and sort of remembered the movie's name. Then the movie came up in a chat after a Tango class.
"OK, enough cues. I'll watch it."
Commercial full length (< 90 minutes) Tango movies pop up every now and then, but not very often. "The Tango lesson (1997)", "Tango (1998)", and, ........ well, it's been quite a while.
The movie was a documentary about the lives of a famous Argentine Tango couple, Maria Nieves and Juan Carlos Copes. They contributed "evangelizing" Argentine Tango by reinventing Stage Tango and traveling the world showing it.
The life story unfolded chronologically. They met young, danced Tango together for 40 years with ups and downs. Their career was that of professional tango dancers who tour the world. But they finally broke up as a dance couple as well as in real life.
Partner dancers as a couple develop two-layered symbiotic relationship, in the art of dance and in the real life. When the partnership is over, their art as a couple, and whole efforts they made to develop their art, are over as well. That doubles the pain.
At the time of filming, they were 83 (Juan) and 80 (Maria). They narrated their own lives, with the director and other Tango dancers who reenact their lives (two couples for two stages of their lives, earlier and later. One of them is Pablo Velon who played the lead in "The Tango Lesson").
The reenactments symbolically presented events in their lives, of course with Tango dancing. Their own dance footage were inserted here and there. In a sense, the movie was a dance movie with many tango scenes.
In spite of many Tango scenes, the feeling I had after watching the movie was sadness. It was not pensive or pity-kind of sadness. Rather, it was a transparent sadness that we feel when we are reminded of the inevitable; all people, good or not, eventually age, lose what they used to have, fade and disappear. Life is ephemeral.
It was similar kind of sadness that you feel when you look up the clear blue sky and see your life from other perspective, or listen to a certain type of music (some of works by Mozart come to mind).
I recommend the movie.
