Product: Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Rating: 4.0
Tremendous Performances/Thin Story
Marlon Brando's tortured performance and Maria Schneider's sumptuous beauty drive "The Last Tango in Paris," an otherwise straightforward arthouse film made infamous for its (for the time) graphic sex scenes. Before director Bernardo Bertolucci would hit his stride with emotionally and cinematically vibrant films like "1900" and "The Last Emperor," he operated on a much smaller scale, preferring introspective dramas like this one. Brando plays a skulking widower who throws himself into an increasingly disturbed fling with the sexually free young woman (Schneider) who falls for him. As emotions boil to the surface, the two find themselves on a collision course with disaster. The thin plot--made thinner by Brando's sometimes hokey ad-libbing--is just an excuse to watch these two performers, and this is where the film shines. Brando has rarely been better; his Paul is a fascinating amalgam of rage, grief, and lust, driven mad by forces he can't control. Schneider is stunning, both in portraying the conflicted sensibilities of a young woman who is simultaneously worldly and innocent and for just being downright gorgeous, undressed and otherwise. The two have genuine chemistry onscreen, and in the handful of trysts they perform, are entirely believable as a couple. That Bertolucci photographs them in warm light against squalid backgrounds adds an air of eroticism to a film that is more about the dangers of desire than the joys of romance. As with "Monster's Ball," though, its willingness ultimately to allow the performances to take center stage is both an asset and a liability for "The Last Tango in Paris."