“Assassination Tango” and our inner Argentinas

After a friend heard that Laurel and I were taking tango lessons, she suggested that we watch “Assassination Tango,” a 2003 movie starring, written, and directed by Robert Duvall.

The tango scenes were marvelous, so far removed from the shuffling around that I’ve been able to master in a few lessons that to call what I’m doing “tango” is a stretch. Still, I could recognize a few moves that are (minimally) in my repertoire, such as the ocho.

I learned from another review that in real life Duvall studies tango with Luciana Pedraza, who in the movie plays Manuela, an Argentine tango dancer who gives lessons to John J. (Duvall)—a New Yorker who is in the country to kill a wealthy general.

Googling deeper into the movie, I uncovered another connection between fact and cinema fiction: Pedraza, 31 years old when the film was made, is (or was) the girlfriend of 72 year old Duvall.

My reaction is, “Way to go Robert!” However, I just told my wife what I’d learned about their May-December relationship and she said, “That’s disgusting, a forty year age difference!” Actually, it’s forty-one years, but I didn’t want to tell Laurel this and make her even more disgusted.

For some reason I don’t find anything disturbing about a much younger woman being attracted to a grizzled old guy. (Could the reason be that I’m a guy who is getting increasingly grizzled and old? It’s a theory.)

“Assassination Tango” has its faults, as the Ebert review points out. I enjoyed the movie, though, and not just for the amazing tango dancing. The dialogue sounds genuine, like how people actually talk. Now that I know Duvall and Pedraza have a thing going in real life, I can see why their conversations in the movie seem so unforced.

There’s one scene in a coffee house that appeared especially natural. In an interview Duvall said that it was minimally rehearsed and, like the rest of the movie, apparently partly improvised. Here John J. and Luciana are getting to know each other after he has watched her dance a few times. They chit-chat for a bit, then John J. gets more serious:

John J.: “If I was a younger man, living here…I’m just theorizing…Do you think I’d have a chance?”

Manuela: “A chance for what?”

John J.: “With you.”

Manuela: “Well, you have it now.”

John J.: [looking surprised] “Wha…What?”

Manuela: “Welcome to Argentina, my friend.” [both laugh]

John J.: “O.K.” [changes subject, starts talking about coffee]

This transcript doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the scene. When I watched the movie last night I thought, “That girl is a natural actress. It doesn’t seem like she’s acting.” Well, she isn’t a professional actress, but she sure can act.

“Welcome to Argentina, my friend.” A great line.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if life in general, and the United States in particular, was a lot more like Manuela’s Argentina? I’m not talking about a world where attractive young women are open to the advances of much older men, but a world where almost anything is possible—where rigid societal rules and mores don’t limit people’s natural inclinations.

This country isn’t that “Argentina” where life is embraced exuberantly, all sides of it. In a scene where John J. meets Manuela’s family, her mother and father talk about the tango philosophy. “It’s about life,” one says. “And death,” adds the other. Everything. Nothing excluded.

Gays. Straights. Believers. Atheists. Blacks. Whites. Native-born. Foreign-born. Young. Old. Women. Men. White-collar. Blue-collar. Progressive. Conservative. All real. All part of life. And death.

I’m getting tired of politicians, or anybody, who focuses on what divides us rather than what unites us. Or who puts restrictions on what is allowed rather than expanding the range of personal choices.

I want to live in “Argentina.” Not the country in South America, but the borderless land of laughter, dance, and free expression Manuela welcomed John J. too. That place isn’t far away for any of us. We just need to let our inner Argentinas out.

Comments

[Idler]

Brian, there's something to be said both for and against your mythical "Argentina."

I went looking for that mythical landscape in South America and I guess I could claim I found it in some small way, along with a lot of other stuff. There's a beauty in places where people live closer to the imperatives of life—something more true of, say, Ecuador or Colombia than Argentina, as it happens. But there's a balancing ugliness and menace too. Threats such as injury, starvation and humiliation are always closer in such spontaneous places. In Latin America there is a certain liberation of spirit which often facilitates romance and drama. But one must remember that drama is more inclined to the tragic, and life in Latin America most certainly is. At its best, it's magical; at its worst, it's stygian. Leaving aside the qualifier "rigid," a place where societal rules and mores don’t limit people’s natural inclinations is pretty much what Hobbes described in Leviathan. And no doubt plenty of Latin American lives are poor, brutish, nasty and short, if not solitary.

When I read this I thought about my experience of the mythical Argentina (including in the real Argentina) and got to thinking. Where would be the best place to live? In such a utopia, if it were made real? No, give me a place that affords a maximum of both liberty and order, resulting in general peace and prosperity—maybe Britain around 1900, or perhaps later in the 20th century.

The British (especially the English) are often criticized for their repressed style and the prosaic quality of their society. But the Britain I have in mind compares favorably to the emotional exoticism of Latin America precisely because it was a society that had conquered its passions. Hobbes lived through the Civil War and saw what the unbound passions of factional and personal enmity could wreak. He once said his ruling emotion was fear. As a consequence, he favored an authoritarian scheme of government. Happily, his countrymen, loving liberty, found a better way.

Individuals and whole societies can be pathologically inhibited, but the capacity for repressing one's impulses is what makes people free and civilized. An uninhibited life is a struggle with one's neighbors in which the strongest or most cunning and ruthless wins. It is, perhaps paradoxically, also a life without any internal moral drama. The indulgence of appetite is the exercise of our lower capabilities at the expense of higher achievement. The most civilized places are those whose inhabitants have achieved a high-degree of self-inhibition. Places where the inhabitants are less self-controlled are chaotic, hazardous and unprosperous, and they are likely to be made manageable by external forces of repression or not at all.

If the mythical Argentina is a place where you can unbutton your collar, leave behind your forced courtesies and circumscribed views, fantastic. In the real Argentina you get blithe corruption, assassinated journalists who took their freedom a little too seriously and someone like Perón or Galtieri in charge.

[Brian]

Idler, that's a terrific comment. It's so much more profound than my original post, I feel like the post and the comment should shift places.

You make some great points. I don't want an "Argentina" where anything goes. Like you said, that's chaotic anarchy. I'm more attracted to how you put it: "a place where you can unbutton your collar, leave behind your forced courtesies and circumscribed views."

In the movie, John J. apparently never "gets it on" with Manuela. The invitation is there, but not accepted or acted upon. Balanced. An opening up to possibility without the necessity of making it reality.

That's tango, from the admittedly very limited perspective of my four lessons so far.