Saura's stand-in, the middle-aged director Mario Suarez (the charismatic Miguel Angel Sola), has lost his wife (Cecilia Narova) to another lover on the eve of his latest project, a tribute to the struggles of the Argentine people told through the moves of the sensuous, elegantly formal tango. Given the go-ahead by his backers, including a shady Argentine gangster, Suarez assembles a team of dancers and craftsmen on a huge soundstage bedecked with scrims and screens. At first the creative process is slow, but the director's imagination is sparked when he falls for a fiery young dancer, Elena (Mia Maestro). Trouble is, she's the mistress of his underworld backer.

As Suarez projects his visions--first onto the soundstage's screens, then onto ours--Saura plays sleight-of-hand tricks with mirrors, with fantasy sequences, with cameras that turn their gaze to the audience. As the rehearsals progress, the movie develops before our eyes, and the cleverly varied dance numbers advance both the plot and the characters' onscreen relationships. The movie's constant delight is in its various forms of creative partnership: the entwined bodies of lovers and dancers; the friendships of Suarez and his crew; the familiar glances among the seasoned players in a tango orchestra, who respond to one another's cues like longtime spouses.

Tango itself is an inspired collaboration among equal partners: Saura, his cast and choreographers, and especially composer Lalo Schifrin and master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. As Saura returns to the passions of his early-'80s dance-musical trilogy (which includes the 1983 film Carmen), the Buenos Aires-born Schifrin responds with a delicate, angular score that's a far cry from his brassy American cop-movie soundtracks. And Storaro works magic, whether heightening emotion through sumptuous lighting and thematic use of color (e.g. a smoldering dance of jealousy bathed in green), or allowing a dancer's undulating silhouette to command a wide screen full of empty space. The cinematographer even gets to revisit his early triumphs with Bernardo Bertolucci, including Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda's sizzling duet from The Conformist.

Of course, having the guy who shot Last Tango in Paris on hand adds plenty of thematic and cinematic resonance, especially to a story about a middle-aged man's consuming love for a young woman. Sometimes Saura overindulges in these movie-fed games, as in the self-satisfied trick ending and a didactic penchant for explaining his method. But if you're looking for a wallow in visual enchantment and pleasures both basic and exotic--color, motion, music, glamour, romance--Tango is sheer sensual overload.