FEBRUARY 22, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 3

Sometimes the short film is plagued by quirkiness. We have a quirky protagonist who must accomplish something quirky against the odds for some universally identifiable reason (love, respect, to honor someone else, etc.). Then, right when we think things have gone awry, a twist in the end saves the day, and the picture. Quirk to the point of predictability. Formulaic quirk.

We’d all like to say that the cream rises above this formula, that the short films garnering praise break this mold, and offer us something new—well, something new that works. I think the Academy Awards have tried this year to choose such films. However, and I say this without disappointment, the best film of the live action bunch is a quirky formulaic feel-good comedy, Belgium’s very own Tanghi Argentini.

Tanghi Argentini opens with an office worker chatting with a woman on a website dedicated to the passionate dance, the tango. He’s a relatively normal looking guy, a tad loserly: thin hair, glasses, pudgy. We don’t know the woman; she could be beautiful, or she could be less than beautiful. But they agree to meet at an event, to dance.

Our worker cannot tango. However, his boss can, and after a brief but intense conversation about passion (including a heart-warming diatribe against the boss for not having any), the boss agrees to teach his worker to tango. Next we have a fun little montage in which the worker gets progressively better, so that by the end of it, maybe, just maybe, he has a shot of convincing this woman he’s tangoed his whole life.

Here, the night of the tango, we wonder where the twist is coming, because everything has fit otherwise so well into the formula. Will the woman similarly have been lying, and “aww,” they get to laugh about it and tell their grandkids? Will the woman be a knockout, and the man discover the passion in his tango, taking her home at the end of the night? Will the two men discover their love for each other? Will both the man and the woman be normal and adequate, thus playing on our anticipation of a twist?

No. The office worker fails. His boss steps in and takes the lady, saving her night. Our worker, however, does not recover. We see him the next day, waiting for his boss to talk to him. His boss thanks him for introducing them and leaves. Then our worker takes out a list of names, some crossed out, looks at his boss, and crosses one more name off. He wasn’t looking for love at all!

There’s nothing deep to this movie, and odds are that if it were longer than fifteen minutes it wouldn’t stand up to a second viewing. But the film’s only fourteen minutes, and it kept me entertained. Some of my friends the night of the screening said that it felt like a commercial. In fact our hero had a Coke, a sponsor of the film, somewhat incongruously. Okay, so it’s a commercial. I remember some pretty good commercials, but I like to think of it as more like a pop song. Sure it’s formulaic and shallow, and it will be forgotten. But it’s got a good hook, fun rhythm, and good details, and though I’m no better having seen it, I’m happier. What higher intentions can one have for a short film?