Once upon a time, there were two girls. Actually, they weren't girls. They were more like middle aged English art film directors who were tango aficionados. One was named Sally, and the other Potter, and they were as alike as peas in a pod, their own mirror images. (There was also a third, gestalt sister named Sally Potter who claimed that the decision for Sally to play Potter, and vice versa, was a logistic move, but that's another messy metaphor altogether.)
Princess Sally and Princess Potter dated Prince Pablo and Prince Veron. Who did who? No one is sure. I mean, they made a movie about it and all, but although the direction, the beautiful and thoughtful direction and the complex and subtle acting are pure and sincere by themselves, it just doesn't work so well when the audience is so aware of the fact that, dear god, that's Sally Potter up there doing the tango with Pablo Veron. Or Sally and Veron. Or Veron and Potter. Or Potter and Pablo. And if you want to quibble with the semantics of 'director' (and coincidentally appear risque), was it even Potter who did Sally, or vice versa?
Sally (or Potter) also had these irritating dreams, no doubt while she slept in a big fluffy linen bed surrounded by a voluminous and altogether disturbingly organic mosquito net, dreams of an ugly dwarf and the models he designs for. Rage, she calls it. RAAAGE! Rage rage rage rage.... oh wait, that's not the right programme. No, this rage is altogether more Together. After all Sally (or Potter) decided that everything should be just so, filmed in gloriously gaudy technicolour and with all the appropriate camera angles.
It is, ultimately, messy. Was that Potter writing the plot, or Sally pretending to write them? Did Potter even need to include it? And what about the tango lessons? When Sally had learned how to tango, did Potter take over on her sick days? After all Potter (or Sally) had learned to tango to a professional level. Was it all a conspiracy marked with an X and a morleys? Were both Sally and Potter in the movie? Or had they combined into their Sally Potter gestalt like a Japanese cartoon or the Power Rangers? Orlando Power Attack, Ho! No doubt it's what Sally Potter wanted. Wanted, one audience. Must be hard to frustrate.
It's just as well for the colours, and the lack of colours. The Blacks! The Whites! The choreography, that beautiful choreography that trips so close to absurdist salad making but redeems itself with its virtuosity. Still, having to go through 12 chapters is a little arduous, not to mention lacking in meaning. 2 chapters would have signified duality, duplicity and complementation. 3 would be luck, the classic tryptich. 4 would be the classic quarters, the winds, the directions. Even 7 would have been magical. But I stopped counting at 12. 12! Twelve! Douze, shi-èr. Long.
When Potter finally sings to Pablo on an appropriate romantic industrial dockside and the credits obscure their bodies, the self indulgent fantasy puts up another façade that it does not need and thereby seals its fate. The artifice is suffocating. In that vital ending, it distances the viewer from Sally Potter's superbly wrought vision and reduces this admittedly intimate tale into a cask marked 'Amontillado'.
huan-tzin goh
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