Bernardo Bertolucci"s "Last Tango in Paris" is one of the great emotional experiences of our time. It"s a movie that exists so resolutely on the cấp độ of emotion, indeed, that possibly only Marlon Brando, of all living actors, could have played its lead. Who else can act so brutally and imply such vulnerability and need?
For the movie is about need; about the terrible hunger that its hero, Paul, feels for the touch of another human heart. He is a man whose whole existence has been reduced lớn a cry for help -- and who has been so damaged by life that he can only express that cry in acts of crude sexuality.
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Bertolucci begins with a story so simple (which is khổng lồ say, so stripped of any clutter of plot) that there is little room in it for anything but the emotional crisis of his hero. The events that take place in the everyday world are remote to lớn Paul, whose attention is absorbed by the gradual breaking of his heart. The girl, Jeanne, is not a friend and is hardly even a companion; it"s just that because she happens to lớn wander into his life, he uses her as an object of his grief.
The movie begins when Jeanne, who is about lớn be married, goes apartment-hunting and finds Paul in one of the apartments. It is a big, empty apartment, with a lot of sunlight but curiously little cheer. Paul rapes her, if rape is not too strong a word lớn describe an act so casually accepted by the girl. He tells her that they will continue to lớn meet there, in the empty apartment, and she agrees.
Why does she agree? From her point of view -- which is not a terribly perceptive one -- why not? One of the several things this movie is about is how one person, who may be uncommitted và indifferent, nevertheless can at a certain moment become of great importance to another. One of the movie"s strengths comes from the tragic imbalance between Paul"s need và Jeanne"s almost unthinking participation in it. Their difference is so great that it creates tremendous dramatic tension; more, indeed, than if both characters were filled with passion.
They bởi vì continue to lớn meet, and at Paul"s insistence they vì not exchange names. What has come together in the apartment is almost an elemental force, not a connection of two beings with identities in society. Still, inevitably, the man & the girl do begin lớn learn about each other. What began, on the man"s part, as totally depersonalized sex develops into a deeper relationship almost khổng lồ spite him.
We learn about them. He is an American, living in Paris these last several years with a French wife who owned a khách sạn that is not quite a whorehouse. On the day the movie begins, the wife has committed suicide. We are never quite sure why, although by the time the movie is over we have a few depressing clues.
The girl is young, conscious of her beauty & the developing powers of her body, và is going khổng lồ marry a young & fairly inane filmmaker. He is making a movie of their life together; a camera crew follows them around as he talks to lớn her and kisses her -- for herself or for the movie, she wonders.
The banality of her "real" life has thus set her up for the urgency of the completely artificial experience that has been commanded for her by Paul. She doesn"t know his name, or anything about him, but when he has sex with her it is certainly real; there is a life in that empty room that her fiance, with all of his cinema verite, is probably incapable of imagining.
She finds it difficult, too, because she is a child. A child, because she hasn"t lived long enough & lost often enough to lớn know yet what a heartbreaker the world can be. There are moments in the film when she does actually seem khổng lồ look into Paul"s soul & half-understand what she sees there, but she pulls back from it; pulls back, finally, all the way -- và just when he had come khổng lồ the point where he was willing lớn let life have one more chance with him.
A lot has been said about the sex in the film; in fact, "Last Tango in Paris" has become notorious because of its sex. There is a lot of sex in this film -- more, probably, than in any other legitimate feature film ever made -- but the sex isn"t the point, it"s only the medium of exchange. Paul has somehow been so brutalized by life that there are only a few ways he can still feel.
Sex is one of them, but only if it is debased & depraved -- because he is so filled with guilt & self-hate that he chooses these most intimate of activities to lớn hurt himself beyond all possibilities of mere thoughts và words. It is said in some quarters that the sex in the movie is debasing to lớn the girl, but I don"t think it is. She"s almost a bystander, a witness at the scene of the accident. She hasn"t suffered enough, experienced enough, to lớn more than dimly guess at what Paul is doing lớn himself with her. But Paul knows, & so does Bertolucci; only an idiot would criticize this movie because the girl is so often naked but Paul never is. That"s their relationship.
The movie may not contain Brando"s greatest performance, but it certainly contains his most emotionally overwhelming scene. He comes back to lớn the khách sạn and confronts his wife"s dead body, laid out in a casket, & he speaks to lớn her with words of absolute hatred -- words which, as he says them, become one of the most moving speeches of love I can imagine.
As he weeps, as he attempts lớn remove her cosmetic death mask ("Look at you! You"re a monument to lớn your mother! You never wore makeup, never wore false eyelashes!"), he makes it absolutely clear why he is the best film actor of all time. He may be a bore, he may be a creep, he may act childish about the Academy Awards -- but there is no one else who could have played that scene flat-out, no holds barred, the way he did, và make it work triumphantly.
The girl, Maria Schneider, doesn"t seem lớn act her role so much as lớn exude it. On the basis of this movie, indeed, it"s impossible lớn really say whether she can act or not. That"s not her fault; Bertolucci directs her that way. He wants a character who ultimately does not quite understand the situation she finds herself in; she has to lớn be that way, among other reasons, because the movie"s ending absolutely depends on it. What happens khổng lồ Paul at the over must seem, in some fundamental way, ridiculous. What the girl does at the over has to seem incomprehensible -- not khổng lồ us; khổng lồ her.
What is the movie about? What does it all mean? It is about, & means, exactly the same things that Bergman"s "Cries và Whispers" was about, và meant. That"s khổng lồ say that no amount of analysis can extract from either film a rational message. The whole point of both films is that there is a land in the human soul that"s beyond the rational -- beyond, even, words to lớn describe it.
Faced with a passage across that land, men make various kinds of accommodations. Some ignore it; some try lớn avoid it through temporary distractions; some are lucky enough to lớn have the inner resources for a successful journey. But of those who vì chưng not, some turn khổng lồ the most highly charged resources of the body; lacking the mental strength khổng lồ face crisis và death, they turn on the sexual mechanism, which can at least be depended upon lớn function, usually.
That"s what the sex is about in this film (and in "Cries và Whispers"). It"s not sex at all (and it"s a million miles from intercourse). It"s just a physical function of the soul"s desperation. Paul in "Last Tango in Paris" has no difficulty in achieving an erection, but the gravest difficulty in achieving a life-affirming reason for one.
Footnote, 1995
Watching Bernardo Bertolucci"s "Last Tango in Paris" 23 years after it was first released is lượt thích revisiting the house where you used to lớn live, & did wild things you don"t vày anymore. Wandering through the empty rooms, which are smaller than you remember them, you recall a time when you felt the whole world was right there in your reach, and all you had to bởi was take it.
This movie was the banner for a revolution that never happened. "The movie breakthrough has finally come," Pauline Kael wrote, in the most famous movie reviews ever published. "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form." The date of the premiere, she said, would become a landmark in movie history comparable khổng lồ the night in 1913 when Stravinsky"s "The Rite of Spring" was first performed, & ushered in modern music.
"Last Tango" premiered, in case you have forgotten, on Oct. 14, 1972. It did not quite become a landmark. It was not the beginning of something new, but the triumph of something old -- the "art film," which was soon lớn be replaced by the complete victory of mass-marketed "event films." The shocking sexual energy of "Last Tango in Paris" & the daring of Marlon Brando and the unknown Maria Schneider did not lead lớn an adult art cinema. The movie frightened off imitators, and instead of being the first of many X-rated films dealing honestly with sexuality, it became almost the last. Hollywood made a quick U-turn into movies about teenagers, technology, kích hoạt heroes and special effects. And with the exception of a few isolated films lượt thích "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988) & "In the Realm of the Senses" (1976), the serious use of graphic sexuality all but disappeared from the screen.
I went khổng lồ see "Last Tango in Paris" again because it is being revived at Facets Multimedia, that temple of great cinema, where the largest specialized đoạn phim sales operation in the world subsidizes a little theater where people still gather to lớn see great film projected through celluloid onto a screen. (I am reminded of the readers in Truffaut"s "Fahrenheit 451" (1967), who committed books lớn memory in order to lớn save them.)
It was a good 35 mm print, và I was drawn once again into the hermetic world of these two people, Paul and Jeanne, their names unknown to lớn each other, who meet by chance in an empty Paris apartment and make sudden, brutal, lonely sex. Paul"s marriage has just ended with his wife"s suicide. Jeanne"s marriage is a week or two away, và will supply the conclusion for a film being made by her half-witted fiancee.
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In anonymous sex they find something that apparently they both need, and Bertolucci shows us enough of their lives lớn guess why. Paul (Brando) wants khổng lồ bury his sense of hurt and betrayal in mindless animal passion. Và Jeanne (Schneider) responds lớn the authenticity of his emotion, however painful, because it is an antidote to lớn the prattle of her insipid boyfriend and bourgeoise mother. Obviously their "relationship," if that"s what it is, cannot exist outside these walls, in the light of the real world.
The first time I saw the film there was the shock of its daring. The "butter scene" had not yet been cheapened in a million jokes, & Brando"s anguished monologue over the dead body of his wife -- perhaps the best acting he has ever done -- had not been analyzed into pieces. It simply happened. I once had a professor who knew just about everything there was lớn know about Romeo & Juliet, và told us he would trade it all in for the opportunity khổng lồ read the play for the first time. I felt the same way during the screening: I was so familiar with the film that I was making contact with the art instead of the emotion.
The look, feel và sound of the film are evocative. The music by Gato Barbieri is sometimes counterpoint, sometimes lament, but it is never simply used to tell us how lớn feel. Vittorio Storaro"s slow tracking shots in the apartment, across walls và the landscapes of bodies, are cold and remote; there is no attempt lớn heighten the emotions. The sex is joyless & efficient, and beside the point: Whatever the reasons these two people have for what they vày with one another, sensual pleasure is not one of them.
Brando, who can be the most mannered of actors, is here often affectless. He talks, he observes, he states things. He allows himself bursts of anger và that remarkable outpouring of grief, và then at the over he is wonderful in the way he lets all of the air out of Paul"s character by turning commonplace with the speech where he says he likes her. The moment is wonderful because it releases the tension, it shows what was happening in that apartment, & we can feel the difference when it stops.
In my notes I wrote: "He is in scenes as an actor, she is in scenes as a thing." This is unfair. Maria Schneider, an unknown whose career dissipated after this film, does what she can with the role, but neither Brando nor Bertolucci was nearly as interested in Jeanne as in Paul. Because I was young in 1972, I was unable lớn see how young Jeanne (or Schneider) really was; the screenplay says she is 20 và Paul is 45, but now when I see the film she seems even younger, her open-faced lack of experience contradicting her incongrously full breasts. Both characters are enigmas, but Brando knows Paul, while Schneider is only walking in Jeanne"s shoes.
The ending. The scene in the tango hall is still haunting, still part of the whole movement of the third act of the film, in which Paul, having created a searing moment out of time, now throws it away in drunken banality. The following scenes, leading khổng lồ the unexpected events in the apartment of Jeanne"s mother, strike me as arbitrary & contrived. But still Brando finds a way khổng lồ redeem them, carefully remembering lớn park his gum before the most important moment of his life.
Naturalistic but evocative, Last Tango in Paris is a vivid exploration of pain, love, and sex featuring a typically towering Marlon Brando performance. Read critic nhận xét
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Distraught following his wife"s suicide, American hotelier Paul (Marlon Brando) becomes transfixed by the beautiful younger Frenchwoman Jeanne (Maria Schneider) when he meets her by chance at an apartment both are attempting khổng lồ rent. The couple begin an extended but purely anonymous sexual relationship in which they vì chưng not even tell each other their names, but it soon becomes clear that the couple"s deliberate cấp độ of disassociation cannot continue.
Show MoreRating: NC-17
Genre: Drama
Original Language: French (France)
Release Date (Theaters): Oct 14, 1972 original
Release Date (Streaming): Aug 14, 2001
Runtime: 2h 10m
Distributor: United Artists, MGM trang chủ Entertainment
Sound Mix: Mono
Aspect Ratio: 35mm
Cast và Crew
Marlon Brando
Paul
Maria Schneider
Jeanne
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Tom
Darling Legitimus
Concierge
Catherine Sola
TV Script Girl
Mauro Marchetti
TV Cameraman
Dan Diament
TV Sound Engineer
Giovanna Galletti
Prostitute
Bernardo Bertolucci
Director
Bernardo Bertolucci
Writer
Bernardo Bertolucci
Screenwriter
Franco Arcalli
Screenwriter
Agnès Varda
Writer
Alberto Grimaldi
Producer
Gato Barbieri
Original Music
Vittorio Storaro
Cinematographer
Franco Arcalli
Film Editing
Roberto Perpignani
Film Editing
Ferdinando Scarfiotti
Production thiết kế
Maria Paola Maino
phối Decoration
Philippe Turlure
mix Decoration
Gitt Magrini
Costume design
Maud Begon
Makeup Artist
Iole Cecchini
Hair Stylist
Franco Arcalli
Writer
Bernardo Bertolucci
Writer
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All Critics (40) | đứng top Critics (9) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (7)
Full Review… Pauline Kael New Yorker Full Review… Helen O'Hara Empire Magazine Full Review… Variety Staff Variety Full Review… Dave Kehr Chicago Reader Full Review… Jamie Russell BBC.com Full Review… Peter Bradshaw Guardian Full Review… Dilys Powell Sunday Times (UK) Full Review… Mike Massie Gone With The Twins Full Review… Judith Crist Texas Monthly Full Review… Jesús Fernández Santos El Pais (Spain) Full Review… David Keyes Cinemaphile.org Full Review… Anne Brodie What She Said
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