Product: Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Rating: 4.0
Donnez moi du buerre!
I remember watching this movie when I was a teenager. I think I got about 3 minutes into it before I "lost interest" and went to sleep. So I felt it was only fair to go back and watch the whole thing after seeing "The Dreamers", and feeling that now I'm old enough to appreciate it. LTIP, beyond the butter and the anonymous sex, truly is a messed up movie. Brando's dialogue is terribly stilted and cheesy, but the performance he turns in at his dead wife's bedside is shocking and moving beyond belief. The movie is as much a condemnation of the promiscuous society as it is a celebration, and the final ten minutes are harrowing and heart-breaking. The movie suffers from 70's pacing though, where too much of the "action" is saved for the denouement, and all the meticulously crafted scenes before that suffer for the sake of a brutal finale. I also found the finale a tad unnecessarily moralistic - bad things happen to bad people...But Paris is beautiful, the movie is at once both intelligent and though provoking and nowadays seems less pornographic or provocative that an Britney Spears concert, although far, far more worthy of your time.