MOVIE REVIEW : ‘TANGOS’: THE SAD SONGS FLOW WITH MERRIMENT

The saddest songs sometimes hit the ear so lightly and sweetly, you mistake their tears for laughter. But maybe it’s no mistake: Perhaps hearts breaking in three-quarter time bubble up with a secret merriment.

Fernando Solanas’ “Tangos: The Exile of Gardel” (Beverly Center Cineplex) is a sad song that plays like a musical romp. It mixes your responses, scrambles your vision. It’s a thoroughly unpredictable, singingly mad film that sways with fumed, nightmare logic toward a hopeful conclusion.

This optimism couldn’t be guessed from its director’s history. Fernando Solanas, who made the famous agitprop documentary, “Hour of the Furnaces,” has been, for two decades, one of the cinema’s missing persons. Like his idol, Luis Bunuel, Solanas was a political exile. For a decade, after the 1976 Argentine military coup, he lived in Paris, directing only one film between the 1966 “Furnaces” and the 1986 “Tangos.”

Solanas, the exile, focuses on fellow exiles: a tight group of Argentine writers, directors, musicians, dancers and actresses. They are all involved in projects that may never happen, affairs, marriages--the whole wild confluence of life--with their anguished, precious memories of country and family always before them.

But Solanas never portrays this condition as monolithically tragic. The film is full of music, light, gaiety, surreal gags, pratfalls, mad jokes. It’s a buoyant, lyrical work. When Solanas glides his camera through the apartments, with their poetic blues and smoky purples, or through the shadowy rehearsal cellar, he seems to take childlike joy in the images, the colors. Like the older Orson Welles, Solanas seems so grateful to be making a film again that, joyously, he packs his frames, makes everything lush and swirls the camera around like another tango dancer.

Solanas’ exiles are rehearsing a show inspired by Carlos Gardel, a legendary singer who, though born in Toulouse, was raised in Buenos Aires and brought back to Paris his own version of the tango: a sensual, torchy dance, born out of the stylized mime of a pimp manhandling his prostitute.

Gardel’s chansons tristes echo the exiles’ frustration. Their show--a “tango-dy” (mix of tango, comedy and tragedy)--has no end, a fact that drives two successive directors into robot-like breakdowns. The librettist and composer are named Juan Uno and Juan Dos; the libretto is an impossible collection of scraps and fragments--cryptic notes scribbled on cocktail napkins and smuggled in from Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is both Xanadu and inferno for these Argentines: paradise of their memory, hell of their reality. They are forever trying to call their loved ones--through long-distance phone scams, since they have little money. They idealize Argentina--like Gardel, who plaintively sang of it yet rarely returned there. For everyone, their French friends as well, alienation is internal as well as physical.

The film works in so many keys, and suggests such different levels, that we rarely see it as a straight-line story. Rather, it’s a set of comic dances and dramatic interludes--with titles, like a poem or vaudeville piece--through which we perceive a story assembling in rapt, dreamy rhymes and tropes. We see it cloudily, as the exiles see their beloved, lost homeland. (There’s a double layer of ironic displacement: Solanas shot the exteriors in Paris and the “Parisian” interiors in Buenos Aires.)

“Tangos,” which won the Silver Lion at the last Venice film festival, is a wonderful, provocatively fertile and original film, but it might initially annoy or perplex audiences. Solanas has formidable influences--Genet, Beckett, Stravinsky, Bunuel, Eisenstein--and one of those magpie minds that soaks up everything. Given his radical past, his pull to the musical might seem odd--though he’s a musician himself, composer of several of “Tangos”’ songs. But “Hour of the Furnaces” was also constructed musically: Its images and polemics had symphonic force.

In “Tangos,” the music itself becomes the polemic: Solanas shows us the issues around the edges, in between the rhythms. And his marvelous actors--sensuous Marie Laforet, Philippe Leotard, somber Miguel Angel Sola, fetching Gabriela Toscano and the others--provide the harmony.

The film--which sometimes suggests the feathery buoyancy of a Jacques Demy-Michel Legrand ballet--has a steely inner spring and resiliency. We know these exiles will return, that “tragedies,” as the coda informs us, “never last too long.” And we know that Solanas, after his years of silence, is now actively part of his country’s new movie ferment. Let’s stretch the comparison with Bunuel--who, like Solanas, was 50 when he reappeared with an international festival winner, “Los Olvidados.” Both men survived early notoriety; both re-emerged triumphant. We’ll have to wait and see whether the prodigally gifted and persevering Solanas has any “Belle de Jours” or “Discreet Charms” in him too.

‘TANGOS: THE EXILE OF GARDEL’

A New Yorker Films release of a Tercine/Cinesur co-production. Producers Fernando Solanas, Envar El Kadri. Director Solanas. Script Solanas. Music Astor Piazzolla. Songs Jose Luis Castineira de Dios, Solanas. Ballet Nucleo Danza. Camera Feliz Monti. Editor Cesar D’Angiolillo, Jacques Gaillard. With Marie Laforet, Philippe Leotard, Miguel Angel Sola, Marina Vlady, Georges Wilson, Lautaro Murua.

Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (nudity, sexual situations, language).