Last Tango in Paris

Ultimo Tango a Parigi; erotic drama, France / Italy, 1972; D: Bernardo Bertolucci, S: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Maria Michi, Catherine Breillat, Massimo Girotti

Paris. American Paul angrily walks through the streets. The young French girl Jeanne is searching for an apartment and finds it, passing by a wacky receptionist. Paul and Jeanne meet in the apartment and suddenly, without any shame, start a passionate erotic relationship. From that day the two of them meet there regularly, not even knowing each other's names, and occasionally speak about their sad childhood. When she is not in the apartment, she talks with her fiance Tom who is a making a documentary about her while Paul is arguing with his mother because his wife Rosa committed suicide. Paul can't have kids so Jeanne leaves him. He follows her so she shoots him.

"Last Tango in Paris" is the most famous film by director Bernardo Bertolucci, staying true to his typical erotic-existentialist themes: here he analyses the relationship between a pessimistic couple who don't care about norms or limitations, whereas the story is constantly traversing from demanding to boring, and back. Calling the film erotically provocative is maybe a bit of a stretch since the first sex scene starts some 12 minutes into the film, while there are only five erotic sequences in the entire 126 minutes of running time (thus with an average 25 minutes of "dramatic pause" between them), and they are also shown in a rather scarce, timid way for today's standards. Much more attention was given to psychology and existential themes, though the point of the story still remains vague even to this day. It's interesting that both English and French are spoken in the film, and some moments were really well done, but the characters are too empty, lax and confusing. But the joke that gives an erotic interpretation to the Little Red Riding Hood ("Why do you have such big hands?") is quite amusing. Marlon Brando acts somewhere between as if he doesn't care or is a nihilistic character, yet he has some unusual outbursts of humor ("You should meet a few clients of the hotel. Hey, folks. I'd like you to say hello to Mom. Mom, this is Mr. Juicehead Junky here. And Mr. Saxophone, he's our connection, Mom. He gives us some hard stuff once in a while. And right here is the beautiful Miss Blowjob of 1933. She still makes a few points when she takes her teeth out."; "That's your happiness and my hap-penis"). The random rape sequence 76 minutes into the film, where Paul randomly jumps on Jeanne on the floor, takes her pants off and puts a piece of butter (somewhere) between her legs, today is so infamous and undeserved it wrecks the movie, though. 

Grade:++