Bendesky: “Today we know which jokes are appropriate and which are not”

“I discovered Tangalanga in my adolescence, not on cassettes but already on MP3. The truth is, I didn’t have much of an idea about his career, much less about his biography and the details of how he had started with the charges, ”says the director in dialogue with this newspaper. “I also did not see any of the various documentaries about him (“The victims of Tangalanga”, a series by Diego Recalde from 2016 in which the investigator tracked down until he found the largest number of those “victims” of his charges). I didn’t have any film project either, but when the producers told me the idea, the images formed in my head. It was a film about the birth of the character, a romantic comedy that at the same time paid homage to a golden era of Argentine comedy, which is not too similar to current comedies. I think that my contribution to the project lies there, in that and in the aesthetic choice that tries to take the viewer back to those times, but thinking about it a bit with the illusion of that time, of how old Argentine movies are seen on cable, with a very distinctive color palette. It is not a historical film, but I did try to give some hints of cultural milestones of the 1960s, such as the first happenings of the Di Tella Institute”.

We mentioned to Bendesky that the sequence of titles that runs through classic images of Buenos Aires in a bus recalls that of many films from those years and also from the ’70s, for example “I won the Prode and you?” by Emilio Vieyra, and he exclaims with delight that although he never saw that film, he is very interested in it because it was one of the few in which Silvio Soldán acted, although playing himself and not composing a fictional character.

In “The Tangalanga Method”, Soldan plays a kind of hypnotist inspired by characters like Tony Kamo or Tu Sam. His character is called “Tarufa”, another wink for fans of Tangalanga since the “Doctor” used another nickname many times, that of “Tarufetti”, in his jokes. “Suddenly we came up with the idea with the producers, but we weren’t sure he wanted to do it because, at one point, he had nothing to do with his career. To our surprise he was not only more than willing but he worked like the most professional of actors and it was a pleasure directing. I think I even managed to make his hypnotist have an air of mystery in the style of Narciso Ibañez Menta ”.

The key character in the film is played by Martin Piroyansky and, according to the director, it was the comedian who managed to find the essence of the character of the shy office worker who suddenly turns into a foul-mouthed demon expert in practical jokes. “It was Martin who discovered that the secret was to deepen Tangalanga’s double personality, from shy to set sail,” says Bendesky, who explains that “the extreme shyness we gave the character was our invention, it didn’t exist in reality like many things of the film, which, although it emerges from a true biography, with the full support of the entire De Rissio family, then invents the details of the plot by creating a fiction, a comedy that is full of the phone charges from Tangalanga, but that at the same time it has its tender, familiar and romantic side. We could say that in the film there is as much of an essential classic as the original ‘The Nutty Professor’ by Jerry Lewis”.

“El metodo Tangalanga” is distributed by Star, the Disney firm, so the adventures of the legendary prankster will reach not only the Argentine public but also an international market, which raises a question about the effect of insults with Argentine names, which on the other hand they are also currently used in a different way from those times. “The matter of how to select the charges, taken from the authentic recordings, was delicate. As a society we have come to an agreement about which jokes are appropriate and which are hurtful, and it is an agreement that I personally fully agree with. The film also has a lot of family comedy, in fact it is suitable for all audiences with reservations, so, although it does have a lot of profanity, finally less than any current TV show. We also prevented women from being insulted. And I understand that those who received the charges would think that Tangalanga was a monster, but we showed his righteous side, that he had it and a lot, since he used to charge merchants who had swindled a friend or acquaintance, especially at the beginning. Then, there is the issue of how insults will be perceived in other countries where bad words are sometimes different and generally more varied than our puteadas. In this I think we managed to capture the unique style of Tangalanga, who was a master of the charge, with a sense of effect that was what allowed him not to be cut off from communication. I think part of his secret was the use of very Buenos Aires idioms that I hope the Latin American public will enjoy.