Word: tangos
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...people who see Tango in the U.S. will at least be mature in years. The film will carry an X rating, which bars admission to viewers under 18. Says Eugene Picker, an executive of the Trans-Lux Corp., which owns the Manhattan theater where Tango will open: "There is such a thing as pornography, and there is such a thing as a beautiful, well-made production by a talented director, and when you see this movie you will understand the difference...
...will also understand the similarities. There is no escaping the fact that Tango bears some kinship to the kinds of movies that play down the street and around the corner from it in the more permissive West European and U.S. cities: the Bad Barbaras, the Highway Hustlers, the Deep Throats. The audacity of Tango might not have been possible, either in terms of the law or of audience acceptance, without the example of out-and-out porno flicks...
...Tango and its somewhat milder predecessors are a casebook study in cultural osmosis-the process by which serious directors draw off the pornographers' best stuff and put it to respectable uses. I Am Curious (Yellow) (1969) seems to have started the current phase of candor. It was followed by progressively bolder films, from Midnight Cowboy (1969), with its homosexual as well as heterosexual couplings, to A Clockwork Orange (1971), with its rapes and sex à trois. Going beyond all of these, Tango proclaims the liberation of serious films from restraints on sex as unequivocally as the 1967 Bonnie...
...insisted on using an actual apartment rather than a set for the scenes between Paul and Jeanne, although he then chose very unrealistic colors and lighting to heighten the atmosphere. He required that the decor be in reds, oranges and flesh tones-"all uterine," in the words of Tango Set Designer Maria Paola Maino. The light that slanted into the rooms was always orange shafts from a low winter sun, contrasting with the cool violet and gray of the streets outside...
...still another he has the wisdom of an Indian sage. He is like one of those figures of the painter Francis Bacon who show on their faces all that is happening in their guts-he has the same devastated plasticity." (Two Bacon paintings appear under the credits on Tango, and several scenes in the film were visually inspired by his work...