Taking a taxi from the airport upon arrival, the massive billboards announcing an incredible variety of tango shows are unavoidable. Most involve a lush dinner where intimidatingly large cuts of freshly barbequed beef are served, to be washed down with copious amounts of Malbec. Meanwhile, the well-lit stage will be taken over by tango dancers, the women in short dresses with a fierce split, allowing for their muscular calves to be exposed, and their male partners, not unlike toreadors, controlling the movement in the arena.
Not convinced something so grand would be our thing, we decided first to get a sense of that other symbol of decadence Argentina has been closely associated with, the indomitable Evita Peron. Walking down the imposing Avenida de Mayo and crossing the similarly named 19th century square, one reaches the Casa Rosada – Pink House – the official workplace of the country’s president.
In the 1996 movie Evita, Madonna does her level best to reach the audience below with her newly found singing skills. But in reality, Argentina’s beloved first lady’s final speech in 1951 was delivered elsewhere in the city. Declining her husband’s invitation to become vice-president, Evita’s body was already dying. A month later, being driven around the city and freshly adorned with the title of Spiritual Leader of the Nation, she was held up by a contraption of plaster and wire hidden underneath her fur coat, thousands of impoverished descamisados (literally ‘shirtless ones’), lining the streets and cheering her on.
Buenos Aires is a city that evokes a perplexing array of feelings, mixed emotions, and bouts of nostalgia. Having lunch at a local eatery, the music of Carlos Gardel oozes soothingly from the speakers. In one of his most famous songs, ‘Mi Noche Triste‘ (My Sad Night), he sings of a beautiful woman who once loved him and whom he now tries to forget. Out of nowhere, I was reminded of the love story at the heart of Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 movie, Happy Together.
Set in Buenos Aires, it revolves around two men who keep falling in and out of love with each other, while tango functions as an invisible umbilical cord between them. Waiting for my coffee to arrive, it doesn’t take much to find out where the movie’s most iconic scenes were shot in the city, screenshots inexplicably pulling me in, a plan forming in my mind. When Evita, barely 33, died, Argentina mourned for 10 days, with some 3 million people attending her funeral, the streets overflowing with flowers. Footage of the spectacle plays on a loop inside the museum established in her memory, while her imposing family grave still attracts adoring visitors. As much as Buenos Aires is synonymous with Evita and the tango, there’s little to no evidence she was much of a tango dancer herself. Its port-and-brothel origins may not have held the right allure as she sought to distance herself from her working-class background. Even if the exaggerations about her flamboyance in the eponymous musical and movie have long been dispelled, her legacy remains controversial, a complicated dance with facts and history.
That evening, we find ourselves in Bar Sur, which is virtually unchanged some 25 years after Happy Together was shot here. Located near the port, the dark neighbourhood and its rain-drenched streets evoke exactly the kind of gloomy romance that saturates the film so blisteringly.
Taking our seats in the back, we observe three men in worn tuxes getting ready, one seated behind a piano, another resting a contrabass against his hulking figure. When the first notes flow from the third’s bandoneon (a small accordion), the evening commences. Graciously, a couple floats to the centre of the black-and-white checkered floor and with a curt nod to the smattering of an audience, they make their first impossibly elegant dance steps.
