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Dance hits
Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango



Robert Duvall is at his best when he directs himself. He proved that with The Apostle, where he played a Southern preacher, and he proves it again with Assassination Tango, a dark, lovely, surprising film that opens next Friday. Duvall’s John J. is a New York hit man sent to Buenos Aires to kill a retired member of Argentina’s 1970s military dictatorship. While waiting for his chance, he becomes enthralled by the world of the tango and finds a new friend in the ravishing and intelligent Manuela (Luciana Pedraza).

How did the juxtaposition of cold-blooded killing with hot-footed tango come about? " I like the tango, " says Duvall, " so I wanted to do something around it, with it. And then I saw a hit man once in New York — a guy I knew from Brooklyn pointed him out — and he was different from what I had seen in movies. You usually see these hermetic guys, but he was a very outgoing, energetic guy who could do other things and was pretty social. And I began to piece it together from stories in my imagination.

" I wanted to get my character from New York to Argentina, to connect the two worlds through social dancing, through the underworld. There was a big Italian population that went from Italy to both cities — big time. If the boat had gone the other way, the guys [in Argentina] would be dancing in New York socially, and the guys from New York would be down there doing the tango. "

Flirting with Manuela over coffee, John J. expresses surprise when she seems willing to consider him as a lover. " Welcome to Argentina, my friend, " she says. Duvall remembers, " Everybody wanted me to cut on that line, which is a good cut, a conventional cut, but no, things go on. ‘What’s in your coffee?’ ‘What do you have?’ ‘Oh, let me taste yours,’ ‘I’d like to make this someday,’ little things like that. I wanted to go out on a linger rather than cut. "

Duvall preferred to convey his feeling for Buenos Aires through such behavioral and atmospheric details rather than through a more conventional visual approach. " I just showed corners and sides of buildings and alley ways, the part of the city that the concierges aren’t going to tell you about. They’re going to send you to the tango-for-export, where they do all the kicks and everything. But where the real people go to walk and dance, that’s what we got. "

Duvall likes to take non-actors " and make them professional actors, but on their terms, still. " Assassination Tango is the film debut of Luciana Pedraza, who gives a performance of great warmth and spontaneity. " We worked for about a year, improvising. She danced a lot, went through her own regimen of physical training and getting ready. " And for a nightclub scene, Duvall got dancer Maria Nievesto talk about her real life, more or less. " I gave her certain points to cover. I knew if she just talked and we compressed it to movie time, then it would be . . . well, you’re not going to get an actress to talk like that!

" At moments, it became like a documentary, even though we were presenting a fictional scene. But that’s what you can get from the people if you try to let it come from them. "

Assassination Tango opens next Friday, April 4, at theaters to be announced.

BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

Issue Date: March 27 - April 3, 2003
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