Bernardo Bertolucci (1972)

Pauline Kael’s famous review begins as follows:

‘Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history.’

David Thomson recognised the enduring importance of what Kael wrote in an interview with Greil Marcus in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2012:

‘I don’t know whether if [Pauline Kael] were alive she would say the same thing now, but the passion in her writing, and the quality in the prose …, it forgives anything that you might be embarrassed by in the piece. Perhaps it’s mistaken, doesn’t matter …’

Thomson’s praise came, though, on the back of his judgment that time had ‘not been kind’ to Last Tango in Paris and few people are likely to argue with that.  If you google ‘Last Tango’ today, ‘in Halifax’ comes up ahead of ‘in Paris’.  The place of Pauline Kael’s review in movie history is arguably more secure than that of Bertolucci’s film.  (It is a wonderful piece of writing even though, rereading it after seeing Last Tango at BFI this week, I was struck by how much of the piece is actually about Norman Mailer.)

This was the third time I’d seen the film.   The first was at the Odeon in York exactly thirteen months after the NYFF screening, on Wednesday 14 November 1973 – a public holiday, thanks to Princess Anne’s wedding to Mark Phillips that morning.  This was less than a month before my eighteenth birthday but I think I still have a daft feeling of pride at having seen this notoriously X-rated picture before I was technically old enough to do so.   I saw it a second time at BFI in the summer of 2007.  I have to admit I can’t remember what I thought of the film even on the second viewing, let alone the first:  I knew I wanted to see it again now not because of either great enthusiasm or strong antipathy but because I felt I hadn’t got my head round it before.  I’m not sure I have now but Last Tango in Paris third time around made me sadder if not wiser.

This BFI screening was part of the National Film and Television School’s ‘Passport to Cinema’ programme and as such was introduced by a cognoscente – Richard Combs.  It’s reasonable of course for the NFTS introductions to have a film studies flavour but what I’ve heard or read previously by Combs has always seemed not only academic but hermetically sealed:  he sees films entirely in relation to other films.  Although I found this latest offering from him dull, it may have influenced the way I watched Last Tango more than I intended or would have liked.   This wasn’t a matter of spotting movie references, other than the most obvious ones; rather, that I saw the film as more schematic than I’d previously realised, in spite of that scheme being obvious enough.  The apartment in which the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider characters have sex – in the present tense, without reference to who they are, have been or will be – is interposed between the flophouse where Rosa, Paul (Brando)’s wife, has recently committed suicide (the past) and the sequences describing Jeanne (Schneider)’s wedding plans (the future).  At the same time, the aftermath of Rosa’s death presents Paul with a grimly real present from which his relationship with Jeanne is an attempted escape.  Jeanne’s fiancé Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is filming her life as a kind of cinéma vérité wedding diary, which amounts to an artificial present, also miles away from the one occurring in the apartment.

The sequences between Paul and Jeanne there are still startling:  at least two people – I’d guess older than me but not by much – walked out of NFT2.  Some of these scenes upset me too but I would guess for different reasons – reasons which have more to do with Marlon Brando and, especially, Maria Schneider.  What the pair do on screen is fearless (and now resonates with that quality in Pauline Kael’s review) but the different kinds of self-exposure that this entails make me uncomfortable.   Brando in this role may have been purging what he saw as the accumulated impurities and frustrations of his movie career to date – that’s saddening in itself, in view of the great things he’d achieved during the previous twenty or more years (things which had obviously made Bertolucci want to make this film with him).  The exposure of Maria Schneider is primarily physical – the audience sees much more of her naked flesh than of Brando’s.   This is, to some extent, inevitable:  it’s a reflection of Paul’s attitude towards and sometimes sexually violent treatment of Jeanne (in word and deed).   But when, for example, Jeanne is wrapped in a towel arranged so as to present her pubic hair to the camera, she does so not because Paul insists on it or – as far as you can tell from Maria Schneider’s acting – because Jeanne wants it.  It looks to be the director’s choice and, once I decided that it was, this made me suspicious that Bertolucci was exploiting Schneider more generally.  Even if this twenty-year-old was happy to do what she was asked to do (and she said, at least in retrospect, that she wasn’t), her inexperience gives her presence a rawness – a nakedness – that a more mature actress wouldn’t have had.  While this supplies a spontaneity that might also have eluded an experienced performer, it makes you feel too that you’re watching Schneider as much as Jeanne.  This feeling is intensified by the fact that Schneider (whose father was Daniel Gélin) didn’t go on to great success after Last Tango: although her filmography isn’t short, I don’t think I saw her after Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975).   (She died in 2011.)    To be fair to Bertolucci, the role of Jeanne was, according to Pauline Kael, intended for Dominique Sanda, who had to drop out when she found she was pregnant.  Even so, it seems to me that he used Maria Schneider in a way that he didn’t use Marlon Brando.

Brando does some brilliant things – like Paul’s barnyard noises (Schneider can join in fully with these, which helps) and his making fun of Jeanne/Schneider’s English.  (In the dance hall where the tango dancers are performing, he puts on an amusing posh English accent himself.)   Much of the dialogue is dynamic and imaginative:  the screenplay was written by Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli (with French dialogue by Agnès Varda) and there’s a good deal of improvised material too.   Some of this, as Pauline Kael says, comes across as unusually sophisticated improvisation.  Yet there are dim contrivances too:  Paul’s famous speech about pigs and fucking and vomiting sounds like a response to a say-the-dirtiest-thing-that-comes-into-your-head direction.   Brando’s much admired monologue over his wife’s corpse, although it’s compelling, moves a bit quickly from foul-mouthed abuse to profound apology:  it’s as if Brando knew another character was going to ring the bell on the front door of the hotel and had to sprint to the end of his speech.   The parts of Last Tango featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud have always seemed to me relatively weak:  casting this icon of the French New Wave as a callow film-maker is a bit lame and it doesn’t help that Léaud was never the same after Antoine Doinel grew up.  In contrast, the scene between Paul and his wife’s lover Marcel is effective almost entirely because Bertolucci has cast Massimo Girotti as the lover.  A quiet, melancholy conversation between him and Brando is eloquent because of the associations the two actors bring with them to the screen.  Gato Barbieri’s music is remarkable; so are the movement and the colouring of the film (Vittorio Storaro was the cinematographer and co-writer Franco Arcalli was also co-editor, with Robert Perpignani).  But earlier Bertolucci movies – as well as the Kael review of this one – have worn better than Last Tango in Paris.

6 January 2014