Tango in a Cold City. - Review - movie review

TAKE ONE, May, 2001 by Tom Mcsorley

2000 42m, prod NFB, exp Louise Lore, p Peter Starr, disc Alastair Brown

What could be more Canadian than tango? It's about longing to be elsewhere (see Thin Ice) and it's about solitude and passion -- all aspects of the Canadian immigrant experience. Brown's sumptuous documentary focuses on a tango club in downtown Toronto founded by a Canadian, Keith Elshaw, and his Argentine expatriate wife and tango expert, Cristina Rey. Now divorced, the couple keeps the tango club alive. We meet the regulars at the club, who include a Vietnamese barber, a Scottish engineer and a Bay Street executive who hopes he can apply the supple gestalt of tango dancing to his own business practices. Along the way we learn of the Argentine Diaspora now living in Toronto, we hear from an Argentine tango troupe, and, in the film's most unnecessary passage, we observe that Keith's new love interest from Montreal fails to show up for a weekend in Toronto. In among the sometimes compelling, often banal theorizing about tango's cultural significance, the most apposite comment of all belongs to Cristina Rey. Sh e offers this poignant and penetrating prescription for the pragmatic, goal-oriented, Great White Puritan northern city she now inhabits: "We need to touch." Although gorgeously photographed by Derek Rogers, Tango In A Cold City is, unfortunately, only partially successful in persuading us that she is right.