Tango Shalom: Entertaining schmaltz about a rabbi who learns to dance - just not cheek to cheek.
By Liam Lacey
Rating B-minus
Opening this weekend in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver - in time for the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah - Tango Shalom is a movie about an Hasidic rabbi who competes in a televised tango contest to save his Hebrew school.
The improbable story has become the little interfaith family comedy dance film that could. Film trade publications report that Tango Shalom was an art house standout last weekend, pulling in an average of more than $5,000 each at four theatres in New York and L.A., thanks in part to a “postcard blitz” targeting older audiences.
Karina Smirnoff and Jos Laniado find a kosher way to compete in the big dance contest.
The story follows Moshe Yehuda (Jos Laniado), a teaching rabbi who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in economically tight circumstances with his five kids. To save his school from bankruptcy, Moshe begins pounding the pavement for a part-time job.
By chance, he looks through a window to witness a tango dance class, and the glamorous teacher, Viviana (Dancing with the Stars’ Karina Smirnoff) invites him in.
Moshe, who is a deft Hora dancer, is intrigued, and shows a few moves. By outrageous coincidence, Viviana has just been dumped by her regular partner on the eve of a big prize competition that will be nationally televised. She needs to win the competition to pay for her ailing daughter’s experimental medical procedure.
Moshe could use the dough, but his faith prohibits him from dancing, especially with a woman who isn’t his wife. Here, the narrative turns into a quasi parable, as Moshe explores the ethical question: Is it wrong to break religious law to save his religious school?
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
He first consults with a senior rabbi, then a Catholic priest (Joseph Bologna, in his last film, also a co- screenwriter and the father of director Gabriel Bologna). The spiritual enquiry also takes them to a Muslim imam and finally a cheerful Sikh holy man, who helps find a a solution.
To wit: If Moshe can dance with Viviana without physical contact, by keeping an inflated red balloon between their bodies, he can technically get away with it.
Fair warning: Tango Shalom is a broad comedy, with a thick coating of the sentimental lubricant known in Yiddish circles as “schmaltz.” There are winking performances, insistently nudging music cues, and familiar stereotypes, including wailing inlaws (old hands, Lainie Kazan and Renée Taylor), love-lorn youngsters, and Moshe’s memorable dance costume, a cross between Hasidic dress and matador’s suit of lights.
During the big competition, there are even a few welcome examples of legitimate competitive tango dancers showing their swirly contortions (and illustrating the observation, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire).
As Moshe, Jos Laniado is better with the physical comedy than the verbal, with judicious editing of his feet suggesting he’s actually keeping up with Smirnoff, a pro well-known for her work on Dancing with the Stars.
And the red balloon, while inevitably suggesting a more conventional method of avoiding skin contact, takes on a spiritual life of its own, having apparently been reincarnated from Albert Lamorisse’s classic 1956 French fantasy, The Red Balloon.
Tango Shalom. Directed by Gabriel Bologna. Written by Joe Bologna, Jos Laniado and Claudio Laniado. Starring Jos Laniado and Karina Smirnoff, Joseph Bologna, Claudio Laniado, Renée Taylor, Lainie Kazan, Judi Beecher. Now showing in theatres in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.