Product: Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Rating: 3.0
Last Bogey in Burbank
Magnificently acted tale of a tormented man and his child/woman victim.Brando/Paul's soliloquy to the body of his wife dead by suicide is memorable, disturbing and informative all at the same time. He starts out by insulting her using the most degrading words possible. He displays his confusion, hopelessness and abandonment and ends with an outpouring of his own unspecified...guilt. There is a moment when we fear that Paul might attempt an act of necrophilia on the dead woman.In his 'relationship' with Jeanne we perhaps learn something of the nature of Paul's guilt. He's a sado-masachist and, Jeanne, despite her beautiful body, is a child. Therefore, there is a strong pedophilic component of the diseased relationship. Jeanne reacts, not as an abused woman, but as an abused child.Paul forces the girl to drink the deepest dregs of sexual humiliation, depravity and degradation. Sex is not for love but for hate....and the more hateful the better. Jeanne, reacting as a child, comes back for more and more and the ending is predictable. The very sick Paul is a sexual psychopath and Jeanne will die, either by her own hand, or by Paul's hand following or during an act of sexual perversion and torture.If there is any question about it, there is the last tango. Jeanne tries to break free but, showing her conflict, performs an act of oral humiliation. She runs but Paul pursues like a cat toying with a helpless mouse. She runs, he runs. She slows, he slows. She flees up an elevator, he keeps pace on the stairs. She escapes into her mother's apartment and Paul breaks in.Now all that is left is for the delicate, beautiful, completely confused Jeanne to die terribly. But noooooo....After watching the film, and appreciating the fine acting, I searched for a redeeming feature of this excruciating and difficult film. I think it's there but am not sure whether the writers, directors and producers of this film realized it. For certain, none of the reviewers here--most of whom seem to have been dazed by Brando's fine acting and the girl, Jeanne's, perfect body--caught it.This is the intimate portrait of a sexual psychopath. Had Paul survived and extracted the last iota of pleasure from Jeanne's degraded corpse, there would have been momentary relief before his next victim...Ron Braithwaite, author of novels of Spanish Conquest of America--'Skull Rack' and 'Hummingbird God'