Product: Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Rating: 4.0
Excellent film, despite reviewers who cannot spell.
Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)There are as many opinions as to Brando's greatest performance as there are Marlon Brando movies. Last Tango in Paris is my pick. Brando and the almost unforgivably beautiful Maria Schneider (also the first choice to play the lead in Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire) scorch the screen in this amazing film.Oddly, for the first fifteen minutes, I thought I was going to hate it. Jeanne (Schneider) is looking for an apartment. Very, very slowly. She encounters Paul (Brando) in one of them, and the two begin a torrid affair for no real reason we can discern (she is engaged but lonely; his wife recently committed suicide). He ends up taking the apartment, and the two continue their affair over the following days before Paul's wife's funeral, while Jeanne's fiance shoots a documentary film about her.Aside from the overly leisurely opening, Bertolucci mixes in the details of the two lives with their affair masterfully. The dynamics of their relationship, of course, change based on what's going on around them, and the whole thing meshes into an almost-perfect look at the dynamics of passion. The icing on the cake is Brando's monologue to his dead wife close to the end of the film; this is the scene that tabbed Brando for an Oscar nomination and won him a number of more minor awards for the film; it should also be noted that this remains the final X-Rated film to receive Oscar nominations, and was the only film rated NC-17 to have received them until Requiem for a Dream. People just don't make X-rated films like they used to!Frank, tempestuous, utterly brilliant. See it. ****