Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Ultimo tango a Parigi, Italy / France, 129 minutes

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.

The Conformist (1970)

Il conformista, Italy / France / West Germany, 111 minutes
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Writers: Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci
Photography: Vittorio Storaro
Music: Georges Delerue
Editor: Franco Arcalli
Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, Gastone Moschin, Enzo Tarascio, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi

I know there's no time like the present for meditations on the sources of 20th-century fascism, what it looked like and how it behaved, yet for the most part The Conformist usually leaves me cold. Or maybe that's the director and screenwriter, Bernardo Bertolucci, who sometimes seems a bit of a Continental Ridley Scott, all outsize reputation and promise, rarely fulfilled, though many films are released. There is so much flash and sizzle to the way The Conformist is constructed that it's easy to be dazzled by its style and lose track of the story and its themes. That might be part of its point, all those glossy seductions of fascism, but the picture is also mired in a certain grainy technicolor look and restless camera and editing of the late '60s and early '70s, which itself seems a little dated and artificial. I can't always follow it, or don't want to. Maybe I just haven't been in the mood—Midnight Cowboy or Once Upon a Time in the West also have many of these trappings and I think they're fine.

In 1938, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a young man of dissolute middle-class background (father institutionalized for insanity, mother a degraded morphine addict) attempting to make a government career under the Mussolini regime in Italy. His psychology is often transparent. He is mild-mannered and dresses well. He is engaged to a silly woman of wealth, Guilia (Stefania Sandrelli), and has the kind of empty friendships and connections that lead to success. By that time in history, for some context, Mussolini had been in power over 15 years, Italy and Germany had formed a powerful strategic alliance, and, with developments in Russia, it was possible to make the argument that democracy was an idea that belonged to the past (again, shades of our own time). Clerici plans to travel to Paris for his honeymoon. His superiors pull him aside and have a mission for him on his trip: look up and reconnect with an old professor of his who fled fascist Italy many years before. This assignment is accompanied with a sidearm (with silencer) and a deeply cynical handler, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin), which clarifies its real nature.

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

#46: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

I told Phil and Steven I wouldn't be mentioning Pauline Kael, but it's almost impossible to talk about Last Tango in Paris without acknowledging her larger-than-life review, which hit papers weeks before the film arrived on screens—as I recall, with an already infrequent X rating. "This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made," she declared, arguing it has "altered the face of an art form." The first time I saw it, barely of age, it sailed over my head and I came away thinking it was much ado about nothing, except for the Gato Barbieri soundtrack, which I purchased immediately and played constantly. Somehow, years later, I got talked into seeing it again and that time it blew me down. And that has pretty much been the pattern since. I hate it and I love it. I love it and I hate it.

There are a lot of things to call Last Tango—"maddening" and "pretentious" come quickly to mind—but I really don't think one of them is "erotic" (though Kael certainly got its ambitions right). The depictions of sex are copious and elaborate, but they're not intended to be appealing, and they aren't. Instead, it's the strange, churning chemistry drawing the two central characters into one another's orbits that counts most—Marlon Brando's middle-aged lost man so emotionally splayed it is like viewing a psychic X-ray, and Maria Schneider's youthful woman such an objectified cipher it's easy to lose track of her (but don't, in the long run she's the more interesting character). Their headlong affair is the mystery at the center of this. Many scenes are built around Brando's improvs, many of which misfire. But when they're good, as in a scene that involves the viewing of a dead body, they are unforgettable.