‘Tango’ Director Expands Repertoire

“Tango” finds Carlos Saura, Spain’s preeminent veteran director, continuing his celebration of music, song and dance, a preoccupation of the last two decades that has yielded such acclaimed films as “Blood Wedding,” “Carmen” and “Flamenco.” Nominated for a best foreign film Oscar, “Tango,” which had a one-week Academy Awards qualifying run in December, opens Friday at the Royal in West Los Angeles.

Not surprisingly, Argentine producer Juan Codazzi thought of Saura for “Tango,” which explores the traditional Argentine dance that has come back in style in a big way in recent years. He also thought of renowned Argentine-born composer Lalo Schifrin to do the score, creating new tango songs while incorporating classics. Intrigued, Saura suggested the Italian Vittorio Storaro, with whom he has made several films, as cinematographer.

Three years ago, Saura--who was in town briefly last month for the Golden Globes, in which “Tango” was a best foreign film nominee--took off for Buenos Aires with his key collaborators. “My first obligation was to feel comfortable with the people I would be working with,” Saura said through an interpreter at his West Hollywood hotel. “We found fantastic things, we went to a tango school, to the milonga bars, and we put all the best things into the film.”

(Saura will return to Los Angeles to appear at the Egyptian Theater on Feb. 26 to introduce a new 35mm print of his 1983 film “Carmen” as part of a tribute to him, which opens the American Cinematheque’s “Recent Spanish Cinema,” running through March 13.)

When Saura returned to Spain with all his research materials, he had to figure out a story line that would connect the music and dance. He hit upon the idea that his hero should be a director facing exactly the same challenge as he faced himself. But Saura is quick to point out that the film’s Mario Suarez, played by Argentine star Miguel Angel Sola, is not his alter ego. Suarez, devastated by his wife’s leaving him, falls in love with an exquisite young dancer, Elena (newcomer Mia Maestro), whom he has cast as the star of the tango film he is devising on a vast sound stage.

Their romance sparks jealous reactions from both Suarez’s estranged wife, Laura (Elena Flores), and Elena’s lover--and Suarez’s backer--a gangster (Juan Luis Galiardo). Ever-heightening emotions in the personal lives of these individuals are echoed in the tango productions Suarez and his choreographers and cast are staging for the film within the film.

“What can we do with the tango now? That was the big question,” said Saura. “We saw it as a universal language with a rhythm that has inspired many composers--Stravinsky, for example. The tango is very rich, and there are so many ways you can go with it.”

Indeed, Saura takes the tango beyond expressions of sexual attraction and movement for its own sake to stage a stunning Goya-inspired ballet protesting the fate of the desparecidos, the vanished victims of Argentina’s former brutal military regime. Another set piece celebrates the arrival of immigrants who brought the ingredients of the tango with them to Argentina.

As a dance, the tango incorporates elements of the waltz, Spanish dances and some African influences, but Saura says of the songs, “The influence is practically all Italian--nostalgia for the mama, for family and the past. Very Italian.”

Saura discovered that the tango began evolving well over 100 years ago in the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where many young men came from Europe seeking adventure. The few European women on hand were mainly prostitutes, and for the men, the tango became a form of competition for them. “There was no influence of the middle or upper middle class at that time. But by the 1910s, young, rich Argentine kids started going to milonga bars, discovered the tango and took it to

Paris, where it was a sensation.”

The 1921 classic silent “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” not only made Rudolph Valentino a screen legend, but also triggered a tango craze in America. This amuses Saura, who credits Valentino with being a skilled tango dancer but in the more extravagant, rigid European style. “Somebody would have killed him if he had actually danced like that in Argentina.”

For his film’s leading lady, Saura auditioned some 200 young women. “I always thought Mia Maestro was the one, and she was actually the second one we auditioned. We always went back to her.”

Much of “Tango” was shot on a sound stage with its systems of movable screens allowing cinematographer Storaro a stunning array of lighting possibilities. Saura had a simple but clear story line for his sizable cast and crew to follow, but the screens allowed him the flexibility to modify “Tango” easily as he was filming it. Saura says he loved the five months he spent in Argentina working on the film. “A lot of people suffer when they work, but for me it was a pleasure, an adventure.”

A tall, distinguished-looking man of 65, Saura has already completed his film about Goya, “Esa Luz!” (That Light), employing the same system of huge screens, this time covered with blowups of the Spanish artist’s paintings. It concentrates on Goya’s last years in exile in France, where at age 82 he is swept over by memories. The veteran star Francisco Rabal has the title role. Saura would next like to tell the true story of a married couple separated during the Spanish Civil War to express his feelings for a terrible period he experienced as a child.

Saura has seven children by four women--six sons and a 4-year-old daughter. “That’s not too much, is it?” he asks in English, smiling. The mother of one son is Geraldine Chaplin, with whom he made nine films in 11 years, including the 1975 masterpiece “Cria Cuervos” (Raise Ravens--”Raise ravens and they’ll tear your eyes out,” goes a Spanish saying), which is perhaps his finest film, a sensitive portrait of a mother-daughter relationship during the height of Franco’s regime. The mother and her daughter as an adult are both played by Chaplin.

Saura said he has never seen any of his films since completing them. “I make movies and forget about them. It takes a tremendous effort to remember them. I have never made an autobiographical film in the absolute sense, but when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored me some 12 years ago and presented a long montage of my films, I was so amazed. The characters were thinking and saying what I was thinking and saying at the time. I was confronted with my entire life!”