Clementine Tango
A fascination with the textures, colors and ambiguous sexuality of cabaret life seems to have inspired this film; one imagines that access to a wardrobe room might have been a major impetus in its creation, for it is a film that more than most absorbs itself with surfaces and leaves one with a memory of images--spotlights and bright feather boas, and leggy, made-up men who look like women. It is the story of a student, Charles, the scion of a snobbish Right Bank family, who roots around a freakish Pigalle nightclub in search of a family skeleton--his father's mistress of many years. He befriends young Clementine, a cabaret brat who introduces him to her backstage world of men in drag and woebegone women stars like her mother who are fast being upstaged by the boys. Amid the glitter of a film that thumbs its flamboyant nose at middle-class sexual mores, director Caroline Roboh (who made the film at age 24, and accompanied it to the 1984 San Francisco Film Festival where it was a great success) cast herself in the diminutive role of Charles' neurotic, ugly duckling sister, and hers is the most accomplished satiric performance of all.