“El Último Aplauso,” a tango movie
This Argentine-German coproduction (2009) tells the story of bar “El Chino” in barrio Pompeya. Neighbors and local amateur singers gather at the bar on weekends. El Chino, owner and soul of the bar, dies two years after German Kral, movie director, began filming it (in 1999). After his death the weekend nights of bohemia and neighborhood bonding wither. The moribund locale remains dead until the end of the movie, when its doors open to give its former singers a single shining last night. They do shine!
The film is more than a moving story. We get to experience neighborhood life in the key of tango. We get to appreciate how the barrio is a referent of identity for the man and woman of tango. (For more about the place of “barrios” in the cosmology of tango, see “In Strangers’ Arms: The magic of the Tango” pp. 93-127)
The longing to return to the barrio of childhood is a recurrent theme in tango lyrics, as Aníbal Troilo’s “Nocturno a mi barrio” says: They say I left my barrio/When?/But when?/if I am always returning…
(Copyright (c) 2012 Beatriz Dujovne)
Tags: Movies
Tango-dance is just the tip of an iceberg
Quinteto Ramiro Gallo