It takes quite a lot of courage to expose yourself, in the emotional sense, in front of the camera, but that`s what director Sally Potter has done with her remarkable film, The Tango Lesson. Potter, who made the Virginia Woolf adaptation, Orlando, tells what appears to be a personal story here. She plays Sally, a filmmaker in her mid-40s, scouting locations in Paris for a film she`s hoping to make, a thriller called Rage, about the fashion industry. But she gets sidetracked by a number of things - problems with her Hollywood backers, renovations to her London apartment, and her sudden, almost irrational fascination for the tango, the most most romantic and sexy of dances, and for Pablo Veron, a tango dancer. The very fact that Sally Potter chose to play the protagonist of her film gives it an edge it wouldn`t otherwise have had. She could easily have cast a young actress in the role, but because she herself is Sally, because she learns to dance the tango, because she seems to fall in love with Pablo - all of this invests the film with added impact. She`s a woman used to directing, to leading - it`s not easy for her to learn to follow her partner on the dance floor, just as it isn`t easy for the very self-confident Pablo to allow Sally to direct him in the movie they make together. Beautifully shot in black and white, with a few colour inserts, by Robby Muller, The Tango Lesson is an invigorating and graceful love story, filled with longing, humour and excitement.
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