"Actor: Katerina Mechera"

• The Tango Lesson | DVD | (25/06/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Sally Potter's self-reflective film stars Potter (an actress and the director of Orlando), more or less as herself, learning to tango from master-dancer Pablo Veron and considering making a film called The Tango Lesson. The film that we happen to be watching, however, is concerned largely with the delicious conflict between the politics of tango--the need for one partner, typically the woman, to yield to the other--and the expectations of the film-maker to do things on her own terms. Can Potter simultaneously surrender and control for the duration of this circular project? The question is made more complicated by Veron's desire to be in one of Potter's films--in other words, to follow her lead. Potter may not be Veron's equal on the dance floor, but that isn't the point of this interesting movie and its provocative, internal debate. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• Portraits Chinois | DVD | (11/08/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  Ada (Helen Bonham Carter) is an English fashion designer living a vaguely dissatisfied life with screenwriter Paul in a new home which is a bit above their means. Guido Paul's writing partner is having relationship problems of his own with Stephanie. And Guido and Paul are seriously late in delivering their script to Alphonse a young director with diminishing patience. Into this comes Lise an up and coming fashion designer who derails Ada's career by snagging a major assignment and making romantic advances at Paul. The lives loves deceptions triumphs and tragedies of this circle of self-absorbed over-achieving Parisians becomes more confusing convoluted and entangled leading to a surprising finale that blurs fiction and reality in a very Woody Allen way.