LAST TANGO IN PARIS (48)

Directed by: Bernardo Bertolucci (1972)

Starring: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud

The Pitch: Middle-aged American expatriate in Paris begins a doomed love affair with a young French girl, meeting in an empty apartment for nameless sex.

Theo Sez: Might have missed the point here, but it seems to be a film about retreating (and regressing), coupled with the Breillat-ish notion of sex as a purifying flame around which human beings dance clumsily and messily - a film, in other words, about desperation and defeat, yet approached by Bertolucci in full-blown operatic mode, lit by Storaro in a warm orange glow and acted by Brando in regal Great Actor style (Pauline Kael's description of his performance as "princely" is accurate, though not quite in the way she meant). There's presumably a crushed, pathetic aspect to the character - he runs a seedy hotel, and no doubt prostrates himself before unsavoury customers on a regular basis - yet we see only his rage and aristocratic disgust at the world (his humiliation is noble, poetic), and admire his leonine mane and Great Actor profile as he vents against God and the universe (his anger at the pious mother-in-law wanting last rites for her dead daughter is played as righteous, deserved) ; strangest - and least pleasant - of all is the treatment of Schneider, literally overwhelmed by Brando (when they first make love, all we see is his broad back filling the frame, swallowing her up) in a dynamic the film actively encourages, even though it's supposedly a film about a man plagued by guilt at his wife's suicide. One gets a sense of Schneider jostled and crushed between the monstrous egos of her narcissistic co-star and grandiloquent director, who neglects the people in favour of high-flown frou-frou about Art vs. Life and the role of the film-maker - the boyfriend played (absurdly) by Léaud, who wants to capture Love on film but manages only banalities (seen by some as metaphor for any director's dubious role in uncovering Truth, as opposed perhaps to his actors' - but that's to ignore the way Bertolucci constantly pushes in between his own actors, smothering the material in visual affectation and an over-active camera). What could (and should) have been a film about people on the edge becomes abstracted, glibly intellectualised, shot through with self-regard and preening self-pity : Brando's monologue before the coffin of his dead wife is like a brick wall of virtuosity - tics, mannerisms, hands cradling head or brushed through hair, voice soaring and dipping - behind which real human anguish is faintly audible. Don't regret having seen it, but it pretty much defines the word 'pretentious'. Sample dialogue : "You won't be able to be free of that feeling of being alone until you look Death right in the face. Until you go right up into the ass of Death - until you find a womb of Fear". Um, okay...