Naked Tango **** (1990, Mathilda May, Vincent D’Onofrio, Esai Morales, Fernando Rey) – Classic Movie Review 1867

Writer-director Leonard Schrader’s 1990 eerie and exciting dance-inspired thriller stars Mathilda May as a newly wed young European woman who assumes a false identity in 1920s Argentina and finds herself caught up in a lurid underworld of rival gangs and seedy bordellos. Returning by ship to South America, she escapes her elderly husband by swapping places with a woman committing suicide. But her new life of an arranged marriage turns out to be a trick to get her working in a brothel.

There are lots of energetic dancing, fighting and soft-focus sex and yet, behind the heady, exciting action, this is a strange and chilly movie, loaded with style and atmosphere, noticeably low on heart. There are several startling sequences in the film, but none more so than the tango in the abattoir.

Naked Tango is well worth a look for all the many tango dance fans and aficionados of Latin culture, as well as thriller buffs and collectors of the plain bizarre.

Vincent D’Onofrio (as Cholo), Esai Morales (as Zico Borenstein) and Fernando Rey (as Judge Torres) also star. Cipe Lincovsky, Josh Mostel, Anthony Pratt and Constance McCashin co-star.

Fernando Rey, the great Spanish movie actor known as Frog One in The French Connection (1971) and for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), died on March 9 1994, aged 76.

Leonard Schrader is the older brother of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader. He died of heart failure on November 2 2006, aged 62. This is his only movie as director.

It is rated 18 or R for strong sensuality, violence, nudity and language.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1867

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