Tangos: The Exile of Gardel
(Tangos, el exilio de Gardel)
With Marie Laforêt, Miguel Ángel Solá, Phillippe Léotard.
France/Argentina, 1986, 35mm, color, 119 min.
French and Spanish with English subtitles.
Fernando Solanas’s passionate examination of exile is conveyed through the song and dance of Argentina’s native tango music. Focusing on a group of Argentinian performers and intellectuals in Paris, forced to leave their homeland after the 1976 military coup, Tangos: The Exile of Gardel follows the exiles’ ten-year effort to stage a musical revue called “Tango-dy,” which mixes equal parts of comedy and tragedy and is based on the tangos of legendary singer Carlos Gardel. Solanas manages to capture the pain, displacement, and longing the exiles endure as they are separated from family and friends and caught between two worlds. Yet his film is never grim; rather it is playful, and his sense of the absurd is almost surreal. What makes Tangos truly magical, though, is its music, scored and performed by tango master Astor Piazzolla.