The plot \u2013 insomuch that there is one \u2013 concerns Paul, a 45-year-old widower (played by Marlon Brando) still reeling from his wife\u2019s suicide. While looking at an apartment for rent he meets Maria Schneider\u2019s Jeanne, a cherubic 20-year-old engaged to a smothering, obnoxious filmmaker (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and to be married at the end of the week. After little in the way of conversation, Paul and Jeanne wind up having violent, nasty sex on the floor of the flat, falling into international arthouse cinema\u2019s most notorious NSA relationship. They continue to meet and screw in the empty apartment, agreeing to exchange nothing in the way of personal information. \u201cNo names,\u201d he insists, repeating it like a mantra. At one point they attempt to communicate entirely through grunts and animal noises, because enough with the pointless anecdotes already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The premise is a knowingly ridiculous male fantasy, and also a terribly sad one. Eaten alive by his grief, Paul is attempting to anesthetize himself by creating a space where only sex and his basest desires exist, growing ever angrier and more degrading as semblances of the outside world keep intruding upon this smutty Eden. For Jeanne, it\u2019s a walk in the wild side and a secret way to spite her over-controlling boyfriend. (\u201cI\u2019m tired of being raped,\u201d is how she tells him she\u2019s sick of being filmed without her permission. Meanwhile Paul is actually raping her back at the apartment.) This is loaded material which Bertolucci does not handle in an entirely responsible fashion. That\u2019s what gives the film it\u2019s unnerving, dangerous allure. Last Tango in Paris<\/em> is one of the most controversial movies ever made because it deserves to be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s intensely regrettable that Schneider\u2019s experience was such a miserable one and that the movie\u2019s notoriety mucked with her career, because she\u2019s really quite remarkable in it. The more I watch the film the more taken I am with Jeanne, and what a mystery she is sometimes even to herself. For all the emotional violence, there\u2019s never really a question as to whether or not she\u2019s going to be okay. For her this a passing fancy, a phase she\u2019ll probably already be over by the wedding. For Paul, this apartment is the end of the world, and I\u2019m not sure any actor has flown closer to the sun than Brando did here. The character\u2019s background is pointedly a mishmash of the star\u2019s own life and some of his most famous roles, and don\u2019t think it\u2019s an accident that he\u2019s skulking around the apartment in a Stanley Kowalski undershirt 20-odd years later. The man who revolutionized onscreen sexuality for the 1950s is at it again, except Paul\u2019s obscenities are embarrassing and overwrought. The more powerfully he attempts to assert himself, the more pathetic he becomes. Brando goes to emotional places in this picture so vulnerable and humiliating other performers spend their entire careers never getting near the same neighborhood. She\u2019s naked, he\u2019s exposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even if Pauline Kael\u2019s legendarily ecstatic 10,000-word review<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em> predicted that Last Tango<\/em>\u2019s New York Film Festival premiere would be remembered in history alongside the riots that greeted Stravinsky\u2019s The Rite of Spring<\/em>, the film now feels more like the end of a certain kind of art film than the beginning of revolution. This whole Norman Mailer\/Philip Roth school of anguished men and their raging erections couldn\u2019t be more pass\u00e9 in a contemporary culture where we\u2019re all supposed to stay home and stream content containing positive messages about empowerment and inclusion. (Just look at the reaction to any interview with Jeremy Strong and tell me how well Brando\u2019s Method madness would go over in our anti-art zeitgeist.) The age-gap cops would have a field day with this one, and the movie\u2019s concept of consent is highly questionable, at best. Last Tango<\/em>\u2019s Francis Bacon painting opening credits, like Vittorio Storaro\u2019s stunning cinematography, are more suited to museums than a window on your laptop. It\u2019s a movie from another time and another place that never fails to leave me deeply troubled and emotionally overwhelmed. I\u2019m so grateful it exists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Last Tango in Paris” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/last-tango-1024x722.jpg\")
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There has been much ado in recent years over Bertolucci and Brando\u2019s unprofessional treatment of Schneider on the set, especially the two not warning her in advance about the addition of butter as a prop in the film\u2019s most infamous encounter. A dick move. However, the internet being the internet, this story has been blown out of proportion to an urban legend that the film\u2019s anal rape was improvised and unsimulated. Somehow this is now a generally accepted article of bad faith alongside other easily disprovable chestnuts like \u201cWoody Allen married his daughter\u201d and \u201cStanley Kubrick bullied Shelley Duvall into schizophrenia.\u201d The kerfuffle reached its zenith of absurdity many years ago when a beloved superhero actor publicly called for the arrest of the long-deceased Marlon Brando, yet has persisted in online discourse to a point where my local newspaper felt comfortable branding Bertolucci a sex criminal in his obituary.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n