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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Last Tango in Paris (1972) 
So how has Bernardo Bertolucci’s once controversial tale of some no-names' sexual liaison dated? Pretty well, to tell the truth, despite a somewhat inflated critical reputation thanks to an outrageously generous review from Pauline Kael (a fine writer with generally terrible taste in film). And while I now believe most of Bertolucci’s films prior to Last Tango — Before the Revolution, The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist — superior works, Tango still haunts the memory just as much as those films. It has one of Marlon Brando’s best performances (Brando’s participation in the film guaranteed its notoriety - had Bertolucci’s original choice for leading man, Jean Louis Trintignant, got the part, the film may have ended up in obscurity), and it boasts a gorgeous visual style: Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro find their visual cues in the great Francis Bacon paintings that accompany the opening credits and go from there; it’s every bit as visually striking as The Conformist. Here, Brando stars as Paul, an expatriated middle-aged American with a varied past — ex-boxer, former mercenary — whose hotel-owner wife has just inexplicably committed suicide, leaving Paul an emotional wreck. Looking at a Paris apartment for rent, he meets 20-year-old Jeanne (the incredibly carnal Maria Schneider), the daughter of a colonel who was killed in the Algerian war. When neither of them can decide whether or not to take the flat, they fall into each other’s arms for a quick, standing fuck that leaves both literally breathless. Paul returns to his wife’s hotel to deal with his mother-in-law (Maria Michi), while Jeanne returns to her life with her boyfriend Tom (New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud). Tom is an annoying filmmaker — a cross between Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, perhaps — who insists on filming every aspect of Jeanne’s life for a television documentary. Paul and Jeanne both return to the apartment for more, and Paul asks Jeanne to meet him there solely for the purpose of sex: no names allowed, no past histories. But in-between their often giddy couplings, real life does begin to seep in: Jeanne tells Paul about some of her childhood memories, and Paul responds in kind by telling her about some unhappy memories of growing up on a farm. But Paul’s pain is so deep and his melancholy so profound that Paul tries literally to fuck away his pain. Paul meets with his wife’s lover, with whom it is suggested she had a strictly earthy relationship with — much like Paul and Jeanne’s — but nothing seems to indicate why his wife may have taken her own life. In the film’s best scene, and one of the very best scenes Brando ever filmed, he confronts his dead wife in a soliloquy that embodies a genuine sense of despair, anger and grief that no other actor of his generation could have possibly pulled off. Tom proposes to Jeanne, and she agrees, but she breaks down weeping when she finds Paul gone from the apartment. Paul shows up however, to declare he wants to share everything about himself now, and during a drunken night on the town — the last tango indeed — Paul declares his love for Jeanne. At dawn, he follows her to her apartment and asks her name. But for Jeanne, who will soon marry Tom, it is too late, and she must remove Paul from her life the only way she can think of - by shooting him. Perhaps more than anything, Last Tango is a study in the sadness and melancholia that comes from tragic miscommunication between adults. Ultimately, the film tells us, we never know anything about the people we love, no matter how much we think we do. The film contains many memorable scenes: Brando’s bathrobe confrontation with Marcel (Massimo Girotti), his wife’s lover, in whom he finds nothing to respect; Brando’s insistence to his mother-in-law that there be no priest at his wife’s funeral; and Brando’s childhood memories. (Most of latter which I suspect, like much of his other dialogue here, seems improvised. I can’t believe the film’s screenwriters — Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli and the late Agnes Varda — wrote lines like "I have a prostate like an Idaho potato, but I’m still a good stick-man"). The (simulated) sex itself is unbelievably frank for 1972 and more than passingly obsessed with anal sex. (Two of the film’s more notorious lines of dialogue are "get me the butter" and "cut the fingernails of your right hand.") Yet for a contemporary audience, it may be hard to imagine how films treated sex in the days before porno was de rigueur. If anything, Last Tango may seem almost quaint by today’s standards. Is that something to be proud of? You tell me. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your film or video? Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.
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