Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Rarely has such an obviously important film been so consciously forgotten. Last Tango in Paris is a critical landmark in the collapse of movie censorship, the 60s and 70s dominance of the European arthouse and the career of arguably the most celebrated actor in the history of the medium. It’s a wilfully confrontational study of sexual desperation and selfishness helmed by a tremendously talented director. Its mix of consummate artistry and blunt vulgarity sent a cultural shockwave across the surface of the planet. I can’t remember the last time anyone mentioned it.
Fascist regimes banned the film outright in Spain, Portugal, Chile and Brazil. The Italian Supreme Court ordered that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. Last Tango’s Italian director, Bernardo Bertolucci, had his civil rights revoked for five years and was given a four-month suspended prison sentence. He was unable to vote in his own country because he made a film about sex. The controversies seemed to spur critics and audiences on, deepening their appreciation and piquing their interest.
Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael endorsed the film with ecstatic rave reviews, and it has since been celebrated by New Hollywood icons Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese. The film’s lurid reputation was a fantastic commercial hook, seeing it gain 36 million dollars at the American box office, beating out Paper Moon and Live and Let Die to become the seventh highest grossing film of 1973. This was a definitive film of its time, a taboo-busting critical darling with huge popular appeal.
Jeanne (Maria Schneider) and Paul (Marlon Brando) are strangers living empty, dissatisfied lives in Paris. Both happen to view an unfurnished apartment at the same time. On a purely irrational impulse, they decide to have sex. Neither knows the other’s name. They share the same hollowness, the same desire for some kind of stimulation, some quick fix to restore some fire into their lives. This first sex scene is ugly and unflattering, setting the erotic tone going forward. They choose to meet again.
We learn more about Paul and Jeanne. He is a drifting widower, living at a constant breaking point in the days since his wife’s suicide. She is engaged to a filmmaker (a loveably pretentious Jean-Pierre Leaud) far more in love with his intrusive, demanding work than he is with her. Paul wants to escape his unpleasant past, Jeanne wants a buffer before she’s locked into an unpromising marriage. Their shared desperation brings them to each other. I was reminded of Nicolas Roeg’s premise for his own disturbing psychosexual drama Bad Timing: when the wrong people find each other at the very worst time, terrible things are bound to happen. Paul and Jeanne’s relationship is a classic case of bad timing.
They retreat to the unfurnished apartment to create their own anonymous universe. They have no past and no future, no names and no purpose. They remove themselves from each and every link to reality. What’s fascinating is that every element of sexuality that Bertolucci chooses to display is coarse and deliberately unerotic. We see very little actual sex. There’s the opening encounter and later a truly horrible assault. That’s about it. The rest is conversation and uncomfortable contact. The most consistently obscene element in the movie is the dialogue. Brando introduces a new gutter vocabulary to the silver screen, cursing with gleeful, mumbly abandon. It’s still genuinely shocking (and quite funny) to see him use phrases such as “that’s me cock!”
Brando’s performance is a towering, attention-grabbing mix of complete commitment, self-parody and staggering presence. It’s absolutely impossible to look away from him. Brando was always the personification of star power, an actor that radiated confidence, charisma and ability with every fibre of his being. In Last Tango he never allows himself to slip. He plays a brutal, demanding, violent egotist with unwavering conviction. Any lesser actor would have failed to make such a loathsome man so disconcertingly charismatic. Brando succeeds, and yet his performance is (unintentionally) very funny indeed. The trademark mumbles and moans are omnipresent, his downturned lips may as well be drawn to the earth by a magnet, and by the time he’s dropping his trousers in public whilst doing an impression of a camp Brit I’m laughing out loud.
Despite all of his self-parodic tilts into bizarre comedy, Brando is able to instantly flick back into serious drama with an air of all-consuming self-belief. In a particularly celebrated scene, he collapses into a monologue of vitriolic self-loathing in front of his wife’s corpse. After using a wall of mocking insults to disguise his own self-hatred, the true depths of Paul’s emotion take over and the character reveals himself to be a sorry, selfish wretch. The cocky front collapses into a ball of tears, and I was thoroughly impressed. This scene appears to be the inspiration for Tom Cruise’s burst of catharsis in front of his dying father in Magnolia. For that alone, I applaud it.
I can’t help but emphasise how beautifully photographed this film is. Legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro captures colours that only exist in the realm of cinema. He gives Last Tango a golden caramel glow, like the distinctive light of magic hour melting into a creamy broth. With effortless skill, Bertolucci’s camera glides and settles through the apartments, cafes and dance halls of an overcast, autumnal Paris. The softness and detail of the 70s film stock is glorious. Films don’t look like this anymore. With harsh high-definition digital and ugly filters, most of today’s films have taken on the look and feel of commercials. Last Tango reminds us that cinema used to glow. It’s a work of intense, spectacular beauty.
Do we learn anything from this story? Is it just there to provoke us? To disgust us and titillate us? The film’s title refers to the drunken, farcical mess of a dance that its two lead characters perform in the penultimate sequence. This should give us a clue to the film’s meaning and the true nature of Paul and Jeanne’s relationship. This a film about the false promise of carnality. Paul and Jeanne both think that meaningless sex and joint submission to base desires is the solution to all of their problems. It isn’t. Paul becomes a violent, controlling freak and Jeanne quickly has her fill and wants out. The ending is crucial. It shows us just how wrong Paul is and just how much Jeanne deserves her freedom. This film has lingered in my mind. Since watching it, I’ve dreamt about it. This rarely happens to me.
I find Last Tango in Paris fascinating and engaging as a problematic kitsch artefact from an endlessly interesting time in cinema history. Films from the 60s didn’t swear. You won’t be able to find an American movie from 1969 that drops an f-bomb. Four short years later Hal Ashby released The Last Detail, a film that uses the word 65 times. The early 70s was a gold-rush bonanza of explicitness: of sex, of swearing, of provocation and exploitation. Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange and The Devils were the vanguard of this cultural shift, clearing a path for everything else by busting the biggest taboos in spectacular fashion. Last Tango in Paris is the lofty, critical darling cornerstone of this movement. It’s a serious movie that’s seriously crude. With artful elegance and a funereal, elegiac air of carnal self-destruction, we get to hear Marlon Brando rave about arseholes and pig vomit. I can’t help but be fascinated by it.
Today, it has become forgotten. Only one thing about the film is remembered, and it has damned it to remain condemned and unseen. The film’s most notorious sequence is a sexual assault involving the use of butter. There are two accounts of the production of this scene, which differ only in small details. Actress Maria Schneider describes it as a brutal humiliation, an unscripted scene sprung upon her that she says left her feeling “a little raped”. Director Bernardo Bertolucci claims that the scene was included in the script, but the use of butter was an improvised addition. In Bertolucci’s words, he didn’t tell Schneider about the butter because he wanted her to “react humiliated”. Despite rumours to the contrary, it has since been confirmed by all involved that the scene is simulated.
Ever since this information has become public, the film has been condemned and forgotten. This is perfectly understandable. It’s impossible not to sympathise with Schneider and the horrible ordeal that she went though on set. The revelation of her treatment coincided with the birth of the #MeToo movement, and has since become an inseparable part of the terrible historic abuse that it uncovered. It’s emblematic of a culture of male control and deceit, and will rightly be remembered for the hurt that it caused. What I find interesting is that Bertolucci’s film has been singled out for a special imposed obscurity when others haven’t.
We know that while making The Wizard of Oz, the teenage Judy Garland was subjected to constant sexual harassment, placed on a destructive diet and fed drugs around the clock. We know that on the set of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, a movie that seems to grow in acclaim every year, actress Rosie Perez was subjected to highly questionable treatment. Lee cropped her head out of a nude scene because she was crying while it was being shot. We still watch John Landis films despite the fact that three people (including two children) suffered horrific deaths on his Twilight Zone movie set. If the moviegoing public isn’t aware of these facts, they should be.
We haven’t stopped watching The Wizard of Oz or Do The Right Thing. I would suggest that we like these films in spite of the horrible things that were done to their cast members, not because of them. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with this. I like Last Tango in Paris and I like Maria Schneider. She gives a strong, fearless performance in the film and I also admire her work in Antonioni’s excellent drama The Passenger. With courage and tact, she plays Jeanne as a woman who has fallen into two controlling relationships and longs to break out of them both. Her final victory in the film’s closing moments does feel genuinely liberating. I like Last Tango in spite of what was done to her. I like it because I like her performance. I can live with that.