Crappy film

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

"Naked Tango" makes for a fairly surreal experience. It has the exaggerated gestures and emotions of a silent film or grand opera. Despite gaps in logic you could perform a tango corrida through, the pace and energy of the film doesn't give you time to dwell on them.On a ship heading to Argentina during the 1920's, Stephanie (Mathilda May), a woman bored by her marriage to the wealthy, much older Judge Torres (Fernando Ray), takes the identity of a young woman she sees jump overboard.Stephanie more than spices up her life when as Alba, a young Jewish girl from Poland, she finds herself in an arranged marriage to Zico Borenstein (Esai Morales), a member of the Zvi Migdal. This is an organisation of pimps on the grand scale, which tricks women into prostitution. After attracting the attention of Choro, an Argentinean gangster played by Vincent D'Onofrio, events head off in unexpected directions, all swept along by the music and the mystique of the tango.The stars make this film, and the stunning Mathilda May makes believable all the obsessive attention she receives from the males in the movie. I remember her spectacularly uninhibited performance in the otherwise forgettable "Lifeforce". Here she dances the tango of the film's title to the music of a blindfolded orchestra without any discernible loss of poise.Vincent D'Onofrio gives an eye-popping performance, but it fits seamlessly with the theatricality of the whole thing. I wouldn't be the first person to notice his resemblance to Orson Welles (he's actually played him in a couple of movies) but here, half hidden in the shadows with the brim of his hat pulled down, he is uncannily like Harry Lime in "The Third Man".Esai Morales and Fernando Ray wisely underplay, leaving the fireworks to May and D'Onofrio. Fernando Ray is perfect as Stephanie's real husband who realises too late that wealth, position and comfort are not enough to keep his beautiful wife away from the machismo of the dangerous Choro.This is the second film I can recall that featured the Zvi Migdal. It was the driving force behind the plot of Jonathan Demme's underrated Hitchcock homage, "The Last Embrace", but in that film it is only alluded to, here it is front and centre."Naked Tango" has great locations, sumptuous sets, an arresting story, and a couple of stars that burn up the screen. When all is said and done, the title of the film is a good warning as to whether or not you are likely to enjoy this film - it's nothing less than an invitation to a dance on the wild side.

I never really was a fan of the dance until I watched this movie. It was exciting (as well as frustrating) to watch Cholo & Alba's relationship blossom from intrigue, to possession, & finally into love. The use of color,location & camera angles during the dance scenes make the viewer feel almost like a guilty peeping tom that is stealing a look uninvited (but don't fret, that feeling only makes all the more riviting to watch).Naked Tango is one of those movies that you have to watch more then once to really get, I have watched it at least once a day for the two weeks sense I got it & every time I pop it in, it is like I' am experiencing it for the first time. This is a movie that is definitely worth buying, just for the re-watch value.

Hysterically bad movie that camps it up like nothing you've ever seen before. Starts out with a good idea that quickly goes down the toilet. A young wife, traveling with her much older husband on a ship to Argentina in the 1920's, exchanges identities with a suicide victim only to discover that the other woman was a mail-order bride destined to marry a handsome young Argentinian - who made a habit of marrying young European women in order to place them in his mother's brothel. The wife falls in love/hate with the resident brothel thug and tango dancer with whom she dances in the nude. After repeated escape attempts, the wife contacts her older husband who sends hired assassins to the brothel for a bloody showdown. Hysterical scenes with a blindfolded tango orchestra and a blood-red monster of a bordello as backdrop. The kind of movie to throw popcorn at. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! Strange to relate, it just might have worked had it been in any other language except English.

In spite of a strong cast, including the very talented Fernando Rey, and sumptuous settings, this movie is simply a pretentious failure. The story revolves around the sado-masochistic relation between a hoodlum and a hapless woman, the latter abducted into forced prostitution in Argentina. There is surprisingly little eroticism in this movie, even with the presence of the ever lovely, and ever nude, Ms. May. The ill-fated couple tango their way to romance, but the utter lack of chemistry between D'Onofrio and May, compunded by a poorly scripted story line, strains the viewer's credulity. I admire Mr. Schraders' work in other films, but this one was definitely off-the-mark. The video is hard to find but it is most assuredly not a lost masterpiece.