LAST TANGO IN PARIS Movie Review
Marlon Brando, an expatriate American in Paris in an emotional daze after the suicide of his wife, meets a young girl (Maria Schneider) who's about to get married and is looking for an apartment. They spontaneously begin an affair while at the same time attempting to remain anonymous—meeting in the apartment for uninhibited sexual encounters while pretending to not reveal anything about themselves. Bernardo Bertolucci's extraordinary and stunningly beautiful landmark film is like an Aesop's Fable with orgasms; we discover, as we already may have suspected, that our struggle to see sex as something “other,” something separate and distinct from our “real” lives, is both ludicrous and futile. To dramatize this visually, Bertolucci includes scenes of both that sun-drenched “real” world, which exists under an open sky, and the hidden, secret world, where this couple desperately tries to maintain a private universe. The apartment that Brando and Schneider meet in is dark and bare-walled and closed-off; it works visually in the way that the dark, enclosed rooms in The Godfather did, suggesting the private recesses of the imagination. This image is also like a child's clubhouse, in which a kid can make up his own rules and fantasize the day away, but at a certain point he's got to leave, as do Brando and Schneider, each by a different route. Brando's performance is legendary, and deservedly so. It's an amazing, visionary work. Co-starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, with cinematography by the brilliant Vittorio Storaro. Oscar Nominations for Best Actor and Director.
NEXT STOP … The Spider's Stratagem, Every Man for Himself (1980, Jean-Luc Godard), The Story of Adele H.
1973 (R) 126m/C IT FR Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud; D: Bernardo Bertolucci; W: Bernardo Bertolucci; C: Vittorio Storaro; M: Gato Barbieri. New York Film Critics Awards '73: Best Actor (Brando); National Society of Film Critics Awards '73: Best Actor (Brando); Nominations: Academy Awards '73: Best Actor (Brando), Best Director (Bertolucci). VHS, LV, Letterbox MGM, FOX