THE TANGO LESSON

Potter’s most overtly autobiographical work is entirely devoted to her fascination with dance and the exploration of power dynamics between men and women. Following the spectacular success of ORLANDO, some expected a project of similar scale. Instead, TANGO LESSON is an intimate, episodic, almost experimental story of the director herself writing a screenplay and a professional dancer. Potter plays the female lead, opposite the Argentine tango master Pablo Verón.

The line between fiction and reality remains blurred throughout, adding an extra layer of complexity. At its core, the film captures Potter’s intense fascination with Verón’s talent, body and charisma, often filming him as an object of desire. In the 1990s, tango was an obsession for Potter, who wrote extensively about her studies and, in 1995, recounted her experiences of dancing through the night. She reflected: “You can’t really film the experience of dancing, at least not directly. You may get the surface of it, but you don’t get anything that resembles the incredible feeling in the body that dance gives you”.

The black-and-white, passionate sequences between Potter and the dominant Verón explore gender dynamics: tango simultaneously reproduces the woman’s subordination (she must “let herself be led”) while offering joy and physical pleasure. In the background, the film also satirises hard-nosed Hollywood producers, ready to crush creativity at birth…

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Text: Sebastian Smoliński