Erotic Transgression in Carlos Saura's Tango

Carlos S aura's musical film Tango, an audio-visual poem, is patterned upon the discourse of the Argentine tango in its pursuit of cultural otherness. The film elucidates the mid-life crisis of writer/director Mario reframed in an erotic site wherein his masculinity is challenged, distressed, and resurrected. With a playful metanarrative attached to love romance and dance spectacle, Tango crosses between the genres of melodrama and dark fantasy to conjure up the weakness of masculine hegemony threatened by murder and sexuality. A genealogy of the erotic via Georges Bataille's taboo-transgression relation substantiates the perception that Mario's self is being reconstituted in an erotic and sacrificial rite transpiring on the architectural terrain of tango dance and musical scenes. In these mise-en-scenes, the subject separates his "other" self from a patriarchal figure with the help of revisionist femme fatales Elena and Laura, as well as with his competitors, Ernesto and Angelo, who challenge him to avoid a living death. It is this quintet of five characters who create the tango microcosm of the film. Supported by his integral relationship with the camera and the mirror set in a cavernous rehearsal hall, Saura and his surrogate, Mario, challenge notions of conformity while reflecting the history of tango, "now and then," in an interconnected multi-dimensionality worthy of Borges' labyrinthine narratives. As a symbolic metaphor and psychological meditation, tango serves to reflect Mario's configuration of the self/other and the encounter with sex and sexuality, death and resurrection, taboo and transgression. Eventually Mario's self, possessed by his mediators' otherness, desires a shift from the self to otherness and focuses intently on the coupling bodies, redoubling his excitement upon entering the maze of the tango.