- Gaston Pauls and Hector Alterio in Tango Glories (Fermin)
Tango Glories (Fermin), which opens the Chicago Latino Film Festival this Thursday at 6 PM, belongs to a genre of Argentinean cinema to which I’m especially partial. Light entertainment based upon the integration of improbable or supernatural events into the flow of everyday life, the genre has roots in magic realism literature and the surrealist filmmaking of Luis Buñuel. The films are generally sweet and lightweight, at times suggesting adaptations of daydreams. I’m familiar with only one auteur associated with this genre—Eliseo Subiela, whose Man Facing Southeast was a sleeper hit on the U.S. art house circuit in the mid-1980s—though I see about one film in this vein every year, more often than not at the Latino Film Festival. For whatever reason, these movies have never caught on with a wider U.S. audience.
The present-day character study is low-key, and the investigation is decidedly low-stakes. The psychiatrist may risk losing his residency for obsessing over a single patient, but as an individual he stands only to gain—by investigating the old man’s story, he gains confidence, makes new friends, and learns to appreciate the unpredictability of life. If this sounds like an exercise in wish fulfillment, then so be it. These wishes aren’t self-serving, but in fact reflect a desire for more significant human interaction. One can also detect the movie’s generosity in the gentle characterizations. With the exception of the tango instructor’s hotheaded boyfriend, there are no villains among the major characters. Almost everyone is entitled to at least one benign quirk, reminding us of the wonderful variety of human lives. Without giving too much away, Tango Glories does introduce some bad people during the flashbacks set during Argentina’s periods of dictatorship. The movie never delves too far into the horrors of modern Argentine history—this daydream never becomes a nightmare—yet the allusions are nonetheless purposeful. They remind us that stories can provide much-needed refuge from real life.
