Sally Potter is one of my favorite filmmakers. I've seen almost all of her movies, but until last week I hadn't yet seen The Tango Lesson. So I made the awkward decision to go see it alone on Valentine's Day at the "Festival du Cinema Romantique." Seeing a Sally Potter movie on the silver screen is an exceptional visual pleasure. She knows how to work a philosophical and visual thrill together into a dynamic shock for a receptive viewer.
The Tango Lesson is a meta-movie, but don't let that deter you. Sally Potter has none of the ego or arrogance that makes meta-movies painful to watch. She plays herself, lonely and quietly, as she attempts to write a script. Fighting writer's block, she begins taking tango lessons and there learns about rhythm, the lead-and-follow dance of romance and work and gender roles. Instead of discussing all that to death, as the French are often wont to do, Potter instead relates these realizations visually, through extended black-and-white sequences of her pacing her bare white apartment, dancing increasingly ably with her partner and somewhat-lover, Pablo Veron, and wandering around Paris and Versailles.
Potter utilizes one of my absolute favorite visual tricks, mixing somber black-and-white with brief shocks of vivid color film. The black-and-white film is the meta-story, the story-of-writing, and the shocks of color are the story itself as it plays through her head. I have recently read that these tantalizing snippets of a movie that is never realized in The Tango Lesson have been re-cast and altered as Potter's newest film, Rage, recently premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. After watching The Tango Lesson I am so incredibly excited to see how she expands these lush sequences and snatches of terror into what I'm sure will be a philosophical and political allegory to rival Yes, my favorite movie of 2004.
Sally Potter just does everything that makes me love movies perfectly, and in an elegant balance, like a well-ordered mathematical equation: lush visual pleasures (but not at the expense of substance), complex emotional and philosophical meanings embedded in said pleasures (but not dogmatically or didactically), gorgeous musical counterpoint (her trademark atmospheric vocals juxtaposed with staccato tango), and unbelievably elegant simplicity of composition, design, and narrative focus. Simply marvelous.
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