Product: Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Rating: 3.0
A real experience that only works once.
In 'Last Tango In Paris', Marlon Brando gives a performance that renders superlatives and previous notions about acting redundant. In fact, replace the bland phrase 'gives a performance' with 'gropes' or 'bleeds'. The film is at its best when content to simply follow Brando, his silent screams of anguish, his profane riffing, his bizarre improvisations, his anecdotal rambles and jazzy clowning, his desire and despair, his laughter and violence. The most celebrated example of this is in a one-sided dialogue with his dead wife, quite but brutal sneers and obscenities collapsing into a terrifying grief, lonelines, incomprehension, need, loss. The not uncomic juxtaposition of this emotional torrent, and its insentient, beflowered, mummified recipient adds a grotesqueness that only underlines the scene's power. The film's brilliant coda, like a 70s cop show directed by de Sade, in which bathos and pathos are indistinguishable, is driven by Brando's reckless bravura (that English accent!) and inspired control. Laugh? Cry? I nearly shot myself.A first viewing of 'Last Tango' can be one of the most gruelling and shattering experiences in the cinema, and one can completely understand why Pauline Kael flipped for it. But this first viewing operates on an obscurantist level that scrapes the senses and emotions, but bypasses the mind. You get caught up in everything that colours Brando's soulbaring - the grimy Francis Bacon aesthetic, with its ugly, predominantly brown monochrome mise-en-scene; the murky, claustrophobic interiors; the dismally ironic splashes of colour in blood red; the circus-ring arena in which the sexual affair between Paul, an American exile whose rich wife has just killed herself, and the young bourgeois Jeanne, daughter of a late, high-ranking military-officer, is played out, complete with poses, props, colours and creases from Bacon paintings that are supposed to express internal traumas. The title dance and the initial set-up - widower tries to find escape in anonymous sex - inextricably links sex and death, and determines a compositional style contesting absence and presence, darkness and light; as well as the atmosphere of sterility, depletion, disintegration and decadence that hangs over the film like a fashionable painting.Subsequent viewings reveal how far the director betrays his star. It's as if there are two movies - the psychodrama Brando is intuitively feeling out, shot in tight, inescapable, long-take close-ups; and an arty intellectual exercise that flaunts its own technique and theoretical interests - the obsession with mirrors, reflections and shards to fragment the body; the doubling of characters; the psychological framework; the Godardian use of slushy music and composition as alienation effects; the sub-plot tripe involving Jeanne and her film-maker fiancee, with all its ideas about 'representation', 'the body', 'subjectivity' blah blah; the Marxist infusion of class and race etc. This intellectual guff is like a prison from which Brando's flayed spirit tries to escape, just as the decor (more enterprisingly) is forever blocking characters from each other. The tension makes for a fascinating movie - although the misogynistic scene in which a gummy granny putting her false teeth watched by the ripe young mini-skirted Jeanne, whose body the camera eyes up and down, unfortunately sets the tone - but for Bertolucci, the irreversible rot starts here.