Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Writers: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Agnes Varda, Jean-Louis Trintignant
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Gato Barbieri
Editors: Franco Arcalli, Roberto Perpignani
Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Massimo Girotti, Veronica Lazar, Maria Michi, Gitt Magrini
I’ve been around the block so many different ways with this controversial picture I’m not even sure where to start. Like many, I must have been drawn to it in the first place by Pauline Kael’s ecstatic review of it in the early ‘70s, saying it “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.” I went to see it, of course, but in a skeptical mood, as a high school senior, and came away thinking the only thing great about it was Gato Barbieri’s soundtrack. It sounded even better to me on the OST album which I played a lot for years. For that matter it still sounds great, creaking in the background of the picture and, even more so, still, letting the soundtrack album play. I’m listening to it now. So good.
Then I came back to Last Tango in Paris in the ‘80s. I don’t know why—probably it was playing in a repertory theater and I didn’t have anything better to do. I had low expectations so naturally, perhaps, this time I was more impressed, especially with Marlon Brando as the low-life loser and US expatriate Paul. Perhaps the tortured romance in it resonated with the tortured romantic in me. Then I saw it a third time and thought it was too long and way too often too boring. I’ve seen it several times altogether now and never had exactly the same reaction. My look the other day came years after learning Maria Schneider, who plays the sexy ingenue Jeanne, registered complaints of mistreatment and manipulation on the set during the shoot, particularly in regard to the so-called butter scene, which is in line with the picture’s general exaltation of sex as end in itself, sex as sublimated violence, primal I suppose but pretentious even more, halfway trying to dignify rape as some kind of male mysticism. It was always an ugly, ignorant, foolish scene—start with the assumption that butter is an adequate lubricant. Learning of Schneider’s revelations tainted the whole movie for me, the main reason I turned away from it all this time.
I’ve been around the block so many different ways with this controversial picture I’m not even sure where to start. Like many, I must have been drawn to it in the first place by Pauline Kael’s ecstatic review of it in the early ‘70s, saying it “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.” I went to see it, of course, but in a skeptical mood, as a high school senior, and came away thinking the only thing great about it was Gato Barbieri’s soundtrack. It sounded even better to me on the OST album which I played a lot for years. For that matter it still sounds great, creaking in the background of the picture and, even more so, still, letting the soundtrack album play. I’m listening to it now. So good.
Then I came back to Last Tango in Paris in the ‘80s. I don’t know why—probably it was playing in a repertory theater and I didn’t have anything better to do. I had low expectations so naturally, perhaps, this time I was more impressed, especially with Marlon Brando as the low-life loser and US expatriate Paul. Perhaps the tortured romance in it resonated with the tortured romantic in me. Then I saw it a third time and thought it was too long and way too often too boring. I’ve seen it several times altogether now and never had exactly the same reaction. My look the other day came years after learning Maria Schneider, who plays the sexy ingenue Jeanne, registered complaints of mistreatment and manipulation on the set during the shoot, particularly in regard to the so-called butter scene, which is in line with the picture’s general exaltation of sex as end in itself, sex as sublimated violence, primal I suppose but pretentious even more, halfway trying to dignify rape as some kind of male mysticism. It was always an ugly, ignorant, foolish scene—start with the assumption that butter is an adequate lubricant. Learning of Schneider’s revelations tainted the whole movie for me, the main reason I turned away from it all this time.
Schneider felt humiliated and traumatized by the experience, not least because the scene was not in the script and she was ambushed by it on the day it was shot, never really knowing what was coming until it was happening. Brando, for his part—and not untypically for him—has also claimed psychic fallout from the movie, perhaps in reference to the butter scene, intimating it was somehow an outrageous invasion of his privacy. It may be equally likely that another scene, in which Paul swears a lot confronting the corpse of his wife in her coffin (dead from suicide), might be the one that got him. He is practically as emotionally naked as we’ve ever seen him. He seems to be reaching as deeply into himself as some of his scenes in On the Waterfront, as deep as he’s ever gone.
That scene has always worked for me and still does, beyond the first time I saw it when it more or less sailed over my head. Now it stops me cold every time and functions as the very center of the picture, what it is finally really about—a dismal domestic tragedy, not a sexual revolution. That scene remained powerful and overwhelming for me again the last time I looked, still a main piece of evidence in the argument that Brando was one of the greatest film players we’ve ever had.
Last Tango in Paris is otherwise much of a mess. The erotics only work on me tangentially, probably most intensely only the first time, when I was still an adolescent inclined to respond reflexively to the youth and beauty of Schneider. I would not call Last Tango in Paris remotely sexy at this point. It is often self-indulgent to a fault, meandering with strained scenes of self-serious playfulness and a whole tiresome thing about anonymity, not sharing personal details, not even names. In many ways it feels as dated as wife swapping.
But, in fairness, you can say all that ultimately pays off as Paul’s own delusion. In the picture’s last act, Paul runs into Jeanne on the street months after abandoning her and tries to kindle a more conventional relationship—one where they know each other’s names and histories, love and adore each other, marry and live happily ever after. It’s so sad and so doomed and the only one who doesn’t know it is Paul. They end up in a bar that is holding a tango competition. The tango dancing is strangely fascinating, at once comical and hypnotic. But it’s late in a movie that runs more than two hours and more painful by the minute to see Paul’s useless protracted attempts to win Jeanne back. It’s hard for me to imagine now how anyone comes away from this with a sense of liberation. But Brando’s great scene still lies encased in it like a gem. Last Tango in Paris is so full of its own contradictions it almost makes that an artform in itself.
That scene has always worked for me and still does, beyond the first time I saw it when it more or less sailed over my head. Now it stops me cold every time and functions as the very center of the picture, what it is finally really about—a dismal domestic tragedy, not a sexual revolution. That scene remained powerful and overwhelming for me again the last time I looked, still a main piece of evidence in the argument that Brando was one of the greatest film players we’ve ever had.
Last Tango in Paris is otherwise much of a mess. The erotics only work on me tangentially, probably most intensely only the first time, when I was still an adolescent inclined to respond reflexively to the youth and beauty of Schneider. I would not call Last Tango in Paris remotely sexy at this point. It is often self-indulgent to a fault, meandering with strained scenes of self-serious playfulness and a whole tiresome thing about anonymity, not sharing personal details, not even names. In many ways it feels as dated as wife swapping.
But, in fairness, you can say all that ultimately pays off as Paul’s own delusion. In the picture’s last act, Paul runs into Jeanne on the street months after abandoning her and tries to kindle a more conventional relationship—one where they know each other’s names and histories, love and adore each other, marry and live happily ever after. It’s so sad and so doomed and the only one who doesn’t know it is Paul. They end up in a bar that is holding a tango competition. The tango dancing is strangely fascinating, at once comical and hypnotic. But it’s late in a movie that runs more than two hours and more painful by the minute to see Paul’s useless protracted attempts to win Jeanne back. It’s hard for me to imagine now how anyone comes away from this with a sense of liberation. But Brando’s great scene still lies encased in it like a gem. Last Tango in Paris is so full of its own contradictions it almost makes that an artform in itself.
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