Buenos Aires currently enjoys a boom in international tourism and the tango is undoubtedly a main local attraction. What are foreign tourists looking for in the tango experience? How do they know what is in a tango and in the tango world for them? What pleasures does the tango offer them? Unconvinced with settling explanations based in the universal and transcendental powers of art, the author explores the uses of tango in narrative cinema - in particular, the sophisticated ways in which the erotics of cultural difference frame tango-esque seduction. For this purpose, tango films of recent release (Potter's The Tango Lesson and Saura's Tango) and oldies (Gilda) are analyzed as stories that, taking place in an exotic Buenos Aires, weave intertwined dramatic plots of cultural and gender alterity - exacerbated by the presence of femmes fatales -, through dramatic and dangerous romantic disencounters with a happy end. Thus the tango, culturally appropriated, promises violent emotional turmoils, erotically tamed via "universal" laws of heterosexuality and homosociality. An irresistible cinematic formula for sex tourism.
Tango in Film; Sexuality and Cultural Tourism; Cinema and Inter/Multi/Transculturalism; Femmes Fatales