Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

#26 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jul 28, 2007 8:40 am

Speaking of which, is Salo still banned in Oz?

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MichaelB
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#27 Post by MichaelB » Sat Jul 28, 2007 9:15 am

davidhare wrote:Umm... the problem there as it has been here is the definition of "artistic merit". It always was and always will be some sort of bullshit non definition existing entirely in the realm of the hyper bourgeoisie.
Which is precisely the point. Because it's impossible to define "artistic merit" with measurable or consistent accuracy, all a British obscenity defence needs is for someone with a reputation as a cultural commentator to speak out in the work's favour. If that happens, hey presto, the work has "artistic merit" and the prosecution crumples.

I know this is a massive oversimplification, but that really is how the system works for the most part. Legal problems generally arise outside obscenity legislation - animal cruelty and child sexuality being the two trickiest ones to deal with, as the law doesn't permit context as a defence.

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Gropius
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#28 Post by Gropius » Sat Jul 28, 2007 9:56 am

MichaelB wrote:Which is precisely the point. Because it's impossible to define "artistic merit" with measurable or consistent accuracy, all a British obscenity defence needs is for someone with a reputation as a cultural commentator to speak out in the work's favour. If that happens, hey presto, the work has "artistic merit" and the prosecution crumples.
Why do you feel compelled to defend a convoluted legal system? Wouldn't an abolition of all film censorship bodies be preferable (the standard social 'liberal' position in fact)? It's not as if there'd be a sudden tidal wave of child porn and kitty mutilation in response. To quote David Cronenberg: 'Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion'.

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#29 Post by David Ehrenstein » Sat Jul 28, 2007 11:29 am

I hope I'm not the only one to remember Ingmar Bergman's attack on Last Tango. He claimed that it was realy a gay story and that Maria Schneider was supposed to be a boy.

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MichaelB
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#30 Post by MichaelB » Sat Jul 28, 2007 11:44 am

Gropius wrote:Why do you feel compelled to defend a convoluted legal system? Wouldn't an abolition of all film censorship bodies be preferable (the standard social 'liberal' position in fact)?
In theory yes, and I've opposed the 1984 Video Recordings Act since its creation - I see no reason whatever why it shouldn't be possible to release DVDs "unrated" if they don't actually infringe the criminal law. And if they do, the distributor can be prosecuted under existing laws.

But what you're calling for seems to be an abolition of all obscenity legislation across the board. However desirable, this is simply not going to happen in a country that's overwhelmingly in thrall to tabloid scaremongers and opportunist (and populist) politicians, so there's little point fantasising about it.

So given that reality, the BBFC can be a very useful flak-catcher - which is why it was set up in the first place, as the alternative was to have cinema programmes vetted by unqualified local bureaucrats. And the Crash saga alone shows what a bad idea that is!
It's not as if there'd be a sudden tidal wave of child porn and kitty mutilation in response. To quote David Cronenberg: 'Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion'.
Ironically, the BBFC today largely exists to determine the difference between reality and illusion, as legislation like the Animals Act or Protection of Children Act is only concerned with reality. Simulated kitty mutilation is fine!

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Dylan
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#31 Post by Dylan » Sat Jul 28, 2007 12:06 pm

I hope I'm not the only one to remember Ingmar Bergman's attack on Last Tango. He claimed that it was realy a gay story and that Maria Schneider was supposed to be a boy.
Here is an excellent article I found online a couple years ago that I think is more than relevant to this thread:
Leaving the dance: Bertolucci's gay images

by Will Aitken

What follows is an examination of gay motifs and images as they figure in six films by Bernardo Bertolucci—THE GRIM REAPER (1961), BEFORE THE REVOLUTION (1964), RIGOLETTO (1970), THE CONFORMIST (1970), LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972), 1900 (1976).

Gay sexuality has never been the central concern of any of Bertolucci's films; none of his films has been more than incidentally "about" homosexuality. On the contrary, his films seem to be more consistently concerned with the incessantly political nature of existence.

There is, however, underlying this central political concern a constant fascination with/abhorrence of homosexuality. It runs through these six films and in many ways reflects or even intensifies the political concerns that lie at these films' surface. This article deals with how gay sexuality appears in Bertolucci's various films, how he presents and deals with it and, finally, how the appearance of gay sexuality has altered in his films as he has matured as a filmmaker.

"Sacrificing oneself to one's passions — but to passions one does not feel!"—Girodet

"Although I think 1900 is a movie there is a lot to say about, my critics keep distant from it. It's as if they were fucked up the ass and refused to come."—Bertolucci

BEFORE THE REVOLUTION

If there ever comes a time when I've forgotten what it feels like to be twenty-one, I'll go see Bernardo Bertolucci's BEFORE THE REVOLUTION again.

An adaptation, in spirit if not quite in exact plot, of Stendhal's celebration of youth, The Charterhouse of Parma, BEFORE THE REVOLUTION offers an exceptional experience: the evocation of the audacity and tentativeness of the time when we're still young but aging fast. What is unique about this evocation comes from the fact that it arises from and we see it through the eyes of youth—Bertolucci was twenty-two when he made BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, his second feature film, in 1964.

The black and white film begins with a series of intentionally disjointed scenes in which Fabrizio, the young central character (Stendhal's Fabrice), walks about the outskirts of Parma with his friend Agostino. Fabrizio tries alternately to convince Agostino to grow up, to reject his bourgeois origins, to join the Communist Party (all things Fabrizio has, with admirable perspicacity, already accomplished). At their final meeting, Fabrizio offers to take Agostino to visit his mentor, an older unmarried man, Professor Cesare.

We next see Fabrizio standing at the edge of a smooth-surfaced lake. On the opposite shore, naked working-class boys leave the water to dress. At Fabrizio's feet lies a neat pile of clothing. Agostino has at last followed Fabrizio's urgings, rejected his life and walked into the water.

The eve of Agostino's funeral, Fabrizio talks, compulsively, incessantly, about Agostino—"he had hair like the feathers of a canary"—trying to make sense of the friend's suicide. Fabrizio's aunt, Gina, visiting from Genoa, listens, her pensive smile revealing the understanding she has of Fabrizio's love for Agostino.

There's a subtle, elliptical beauty in Bertolucci's handling of this love, not because he attempts to disguise it, but rather because he reveals that love through the developing tenderness between Fabrizio and Gina.

It is finally Gina and not Agostino whom Fabrizio takes to meet Professor Cesare. There in his cluttered monastic quarters, Cesare and Fabrizio talk about Agostino's death while a suddenly jealous Gina attempts to drown out their conversation by playing the radio. And it is here that Gina and Fabrizio read to each other from Oscar Wilde ("The only man with more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action").

What becomes increasingly clear as the film sweeps along through the confusions of youth (and the stunning visual equivalents Bertolucci finds for that confusion) is that Fabrizio is attempting to build his life by rejection-first his family and their bourgeois politics, then his love for Agostino, finally his love for Gina. The film becomes Bertolucci's buildingungs movie, a series of farewells to the past. (The film's title comes from Talleyrand: "Who has not known the life before the revolution doesn't know the sweetness of living.")

The replacement of Agostino by his aunt, Gina, the substitution of one taboo for another—a sort of homosexuality by a sort of incest—ultimately leads Fabrizio, in his quest for an unremarkable life, to ditch Gina and marry a respectable bourgeois. By the end of the film Fabrizio realizes his nostalgia is for the beauty of life as it is in the present. He repudiates the Party and his socially unacceptable relationship with Gina (she is, after all, quite obviously his senior by many years) and avidly pursues a normal life, devoid of radicalism, be it political or sexual.

This attempt at rejection of family and class is explicable and, considering the class, entirely laudable. Bertolucci, though, instead of seeing Agostino and Gina and the homosexuality and incest they represent as destructive challenges to the family (and therefore to the central essential unit of the capitalist structure), insists on viewing them as manifestations of bourgeois decadence. It is here we first view the ambivalence that will intensify with each successive film: Is variant sexuality decadent or subversive? That Fabrizio ends up sacrificing Agostino and Gina in order eventually to regain bourgeois respectability indicates one aspect of Bertolucci's enduring ambivalence.

What gives BEFORE THE REVOLUTION its tone of ineffable sadness is the confluence we sense between Fabrizio's life and Bertolucci's own. All his central heroes, until LAST TANGO IN PARIS, are roughly Bertolucci's own age at the time he is making each film. His films, like Fabrizio's life, have grown decreasingly political, nearly anti-political—that is, until the radical surprise of 1900—because love for the sensuality of life as it appears to him is contradictory to the necessity for political upheaval. (And yet, I want to add, a sensual involvement with the world must surely precede the impulse to change it, improve it.) Similarly, the replacement of Agostino by Gina is presented as necessary growth, a gaining of adulthood through mature heterosexuality.

The irony then arises that Fabrizio must put behind him even that heterosexual love because it exists outside established norms, too erotically informed to be completely acceptable in Fabrizio's milieu. The deliberateness of these rejections, particularly as Fabrizio is aware (and, evidently, Bertolucci, too) of their deliberateness, gives the film a quality more elegiac than valedictory, a character and its creator mourning what he was and what he won't allow himself to be.

THE GRIM REAPER

Moving from Bertolucci's second feature to his first is going reluctantly from the startling operatic lyricism of the Godard-influenced BEFORE THE REVOLUTION to the somber, highly formal structure and compositions of THE GRIM REAPER (LA COMMARE SECCA).

THE GRIM REAPER essentially is an homage to the late Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prior to making it in 1961 at the age of twenty, Bertolucci's chief film experience had come from working as assistant director on Pasolini's ACCATONI Bertolucci's father, the respected Italian poet and film critic, had introduced his twelve-year-old son to Pasolini. The young Bertolucci admired Pasolini's poetry, and when Bertolucci himself became a prize-winning poet several years later, Pasolini returned the compliment. Soon Bertolucci was being touted in the Italian press as Pasolini's young protégé.

THE GRIM REAPER is the work of a protégé; stiff and restrained, we sense Bertolucci is uncomfortable working in Pasolini's lower-depths tradition. A prostitute is found murdered near a public park in Rome. A RASHOMON-like structure allows the events leading up to the murder to be described from several viewpoints, with a late afternoon rainstorm interrupting each retelling in order to provide the viewer with a still point from which chronologically to link up the separate viewpoints. Each person in the park prior to the murder remembers a man lurking in the shadows: we're led to assume that he is the murderer. But then, when the police have finished their investigation without reaching a solution, the man from the shadows comes forward. He's a young gay man who was cruising the park that night. After much hesitation, he has found the courage to blow his cover (remember, this is 1962) and lead the police to the actual murderer.

RIGOLETTO/THE SPIDER'S STRATEGEM

Bertolucci made RIGOLETTO, released in North America as THE SPIDER'S STRATEGEM, for Italian television in 1970. Here he begins to develop the twinning motif that will run through THE CONFORMIST, LAST TANGO IN PARIS and 1900. This time round, a young man returns to his father's town to investigate the legend of his murdered father as anti-Fascist hero. The twinning comes up first because both father and son are played by the same actor, Giulio Brogi). In addition, flashbacks from the son's present to the father's past (as narrated by the father's mistress and comrades) work as enigmatic mirrors.

Shot in the miniature city of Sabbioneta (in the film campily called Tara), RIGOLETTO is a faithful working out of the central story of Borges' Labyrinth, "Theme of a Traitor and Hero." The father, leader of the local anti-Fascist resistance, is discovered by his comrades to be a double agent. At the father's insistence, his own assassination is arranged to occur in public (during the opera of the film's title) so as to appear as though the Fascists have murdered the leader of the resistance rather than that the resistance has murdered one of its traitorous own. By creating the myth of his own death, by transforming himself from traitor to anti-Fascist martyr, the father becomes both traitor and hero.

The fascination with the traitor-hero might have its roots in Bertolucci's own shifting allegiances. His bourgeois rebels, Fabrizio for one, reject their own class and end up feeling nostalgic over what they've rejected and apprehensive about their loyalty to a new cause. Marcello in THE CONFORMIST escapes his eccentric, decadent family in order to embrace the virile purity of fascism but ultimately betrays the fascists in their turn. The fear appears and is affirmed again and again: once a traitor, always a traitor. A critic in Ecran pointed out that, with 1900, Bertolucci has attempted to obliterate this enduring uneasiness of the apostate by becoming "more proletarian than the proletariat."

There are implicit homoerotic connotations to the doubling theme. For example, the father's mistress eventually offers herself to the son as a way to his father's love, recognizing that the son wants the father as much as he wants the truth; in the end the son actually becomes the father. However, RIGOLETTO seems less concerned with gay characters or gay love than either THE GRIM REAPER or BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. There does appear one memorable image of sexual ambiguity that Bertolucci will use again with even greater resonance in THE CONFORMIST. An ubiquitous servant boy seems to provoke curiosity in the son in RIGOLETTO; the boy is forever appearing and disappearing, wearing the farm boy's straw hat and flashing an indecipherable smile. Finally the son finds himself alone in a room with the boy. The boy smiles knowingly, seductively and then removes his straw hat: a mass of long black hair tumbles down and the boy saunters away, now quite obviously an adolescent girl.

THE CONFORMIST

THE CONFORMIST somehow represents the culmination of all Bertolucci's earlier work (he has said he makes "always the same film," just as "the robins always sing the same song"). It has the twinning, the mirror images and events confronting each other across the film; the investigation of the father-figure under suspicion; the hero's consuming quest for a normal rather than a double life; and, most notably, the complete emergence of gay sexuality as an erotic possibility.

THE CONFORMIST was Bertolucci's first real period-piece. And what a period—Italy, 1938. It's a highly stylized Art Deco Italy of grand shining marble spaces and tight bourgeois parlors leopard-striped by light slatted through Venetian blinds. Working again from a literary source-Alberto Moravia's novel of the same title—Bertolucci presents his main character, Marcello (played to fastidious perfection by a tight-lipped Jean-Louis Trintignant), son of an insane father and a dope-addicted mother.

Marcello could be BEFORE THE REVOLUTION's Fabrizio ten years older and a quarter of a century earlier. Desperate to grab onto some vestige of normality, Marcello becomes engaged to a marvelously amoral bourgeois woman (acted with rapacious gusto by Stefania Sandrelli). When he goes to prenuptial confession he counts among his sins that of murder.

In flashback we see Marcello, a young boy in short pants on his way home from school, first being sexually humiliated by a group of schoolboys, then followed by a chauffeur in an imposing limousine. The chauffeur, Lino (Pierre Clementi), eventually coaxes the young Marcello into his car and drives him to his employer's mansion atop a landscaped hill high above the city. The two climb to Lino's attic room, play hide and seek among the drying laundry hanging from washlines stretched between the rafters (the scene is eerily reminiscent of the hero's death at the conclusion of Wajda's great ASHES AND DIAMONDS).

In Lino's tiny whitewashed room, the chauffeur first inexplicably produces a gun and then takes off his chauffeur's cap, his long black hair suddenly tumbling to his shoulders in a bizarre metamorphosis of the image first presented by the young servant boy-girl in RIGOLETTO. Lino dons a kimono, murmuring softly to the boy, "Kill the butterfly. Kill the beautiful butterfly." He pulls Marcello onto the bed, strokes the boy's bare legs. Suddenly Marcello holds the gun, shoots the walls, the blue Madonna above the bed. Lino lies crumpled on the floor at the side of the bed, blood gushing from his head. Marcello runs away.

Twenty years later, the priest absolves the bridegroom Marcello, relieved to know no sexual act occurred with the chauffeur and more than eager to give absolution to someone as closely associated with the Fascist cause as Marcello.

Just as Fabrizio in BEFORE THE REVOLUTION intended to take his first love, Agostino, to see Professor Cesare and finally ended up taking his aunt, Gina, so does Marcello in THE CONFORMIST end up taking his bride to Paris, ostensibly to visit Professor Quatri, Marcello's philosophy teacher when Marcello was at university. (On the hilariously sexy honeymoon train from Rome to Paris, Marcello's bride graphically relates how she lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to an older man and then, turned on by her own confession, proceeds to seduce and mount the passive Marcello as the train roars into a tunnel.)

This visit to the professor has an ulterior motive: Marcello is to kill Professor Quatri, the anti-Fascist in exile, in order to prove his allegiance to the party and therefore his normality. Marcello and his wife find Quatri living in a Paris flat with a group of devoted young men and his wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda). Anna, at first a butch-lesbian caricature—striding about, hands thrust firmly in trouser pockets—quickly becomes the epicenter of repressed erotic desires in the film. Anna, alone of all the characters in the perhaps oversimplified Reichean schema of the film, is a free sexual agent, radiating a determined sensuality that at once frightens and fascinates Marcello.

It is not so much Anna whom Marcello comes to love but rather the sexual possibilities she represents, her triumphant lesbianism mirroring his cowering in the closets of respectable marriage and ultra-respectable Fascism. Become voyeur, he watches silently from a hotel corridor as Anna seduces his only somewhat reluctant wife, watches Anna master his wife through the paces of a steamy tango performed at a public dancehall, later attempts to kiss Anna but suddenly pulls back, his bitten lip streaming blood. Anna in many ways provides a (temporary) resolution to the question of whether homosexuality is decadent or subversive, for she is firmly gay and firmly allied with the anti-Fascist cause. Marcello too is finally subversive in that he betrays both ends of the political spectrum in his continuing attempt to appear normal

He sets up Anna's husband for murder, flatters the unbeguiled Professor Quatri, reminds him of his lecture on Plato's myth of the cave, expresses a desire to join the anti-Fascist cause. After describing the image of Plato's shadows flaming on the wall of the cave, Quatri throws open the windows of his study, letting the clear light stream in. Marcello seeks refuge in the room's remaining shadows.

This Socratic relation—older man teaching impressionable youth—runs in an ambiguous refrain from BEFORE THE REVOLUTION to THE CONFORMIST and gets intermingled with another strain—murder of the father by the son. At the end of BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, Fabrizio has rejected Professor Cesare, rejected Cesare's Marxism and his unusual, womanless life. In RIGOLETTO the son comes to find, investigate and kill the legend of his flamboyantly heroic father and ends taking his father's place, becoming what the son simultaneously wanted to love and reject. At the end of THE CONFORMIST Marcello arranges and assists in the murder of Professor Quatri, denies his teachings and his trust, refuses to accept the loving teacher-pupil father-son relationship proffered. He also allows the avoidable murder of Anna, watches as she's hunted down in a forest like some wild beautiful animal, and sees the obliteration of her disturbing sexuality.

In the odd epilogue to THE CONFORMIST, set the night of the fall of Mussolini, Marcello goes out into the streets of Rome to meet his Fascist mentor, a blind radio-propagandist. An interesting and chilling mirror image of Quatri and all his clear light, this blind man is a person whom Marcello always finds ensconced in shadows. And now Marcello completes the twin mirrors of his life by betraying and abandoning his blind sponsor to a rampaging vengeful Liberation mob.

This betrayal occurs because Marcello, while walking with the blind man, encounters Lino—the Madame Butterfly chauffeur he thought he had murdered as a schoolboy in that attic room—talking to a bare-chested young hustler. Letting his blind mentor be borne away by the crowd, Marcello returns to find the hustler. Our last glimpse of Marcello: the young hustler's naked back bends over the phonograph in his open-air quarters in a Roman ruin; he starts a pop Italian song and returns to his bed and the waiting Marcello.

LAST TANGO IN PARIS

In LAST TANGO IN PARIS, at a certain point Paul (Marlon Brando) has convinced the young Jeanne (Maria Schneider) that their sexual liaison should remain completely anonymous (no names), completely secret (Jeanne won't tell her fiancé, Paul seems to have no friends to tell), and circumscribed (by the walls of their apartment rented especially for the affair). It is at that point when Paul tells Jeanne, indicating the rooms of their empty apartment, "Everything outside this place is pure bullshit."

I think it was at this line that I realized, although I couldn't have exactly told you how or why, that everything within that place was bullshit too. At first, noting the camera showing us the name of the street—Rue Jules Verne—where Paul and Jeanne, both inspecting the same apartment for rent, meet and suddenly make love, I assumed the street sign was meant to indicate that Bertolucci was working out the prototypical heterosexual male fantasy-pure lusty fucks, no encumbering attachments. That this relationship ultimately failed, in fact proved fatal for Paul, seemed to indicate that Bertolucci was saying this sort of macho fantasy was over, impossible (after all, Jeanne won in the end, dressing Paul in her father's military cap and gunning him down in a scene curiously, touchingly reminiscent of the final scene of Godard's BREATHLESS).

LAST TANGO didn't really begin to make sense to me until I came across Norman Mailer's piece, half broadside against Pauline Kael, half illuminating critique. (Kael, it should be noted, has done more to establish Bertolucci's reputation in North America than any other critic writing. She did, however, warn in a perceptively prophetic article on THE CONFORMIST that Bertolucci's obsession with style for style's sake could lead him to make "luscious fruity movies." What's peculiar is that she didn't recognize her prediction come true with LAST TANGO.) The essence of Mailer's criticism states that Bertolucci goes a certain daring distance with LAST TANGO—in allowing his actors to improvise, in his stylization of Paris, in his unexpected touches of the surreal and the grotesque—but the distance gone is just far enough to tip us off he hasn't made it all the way, has tried for personal and artistic autonomy, but has pulled up just short of his goal.

Add to Mailer's assessment Ingmar Bergman's unexpected but certainly revealing comment that LAST TANGO would have been a much more truthful film had the Jeanne/Maria Schneider role been played by a boy, and suddenly the subliminal fragmentary feel of the film melds into an explanation. Suddenly all the pieces that did not, would not, fit—why does Brando, a recent widower, need to keep his affair with Jeanne a secret? Why the anonymity, the hiding? What's the sense behind Jeanne and Paul, two adult heterosexuals, leading double lives? What purpose does it serve? Why the anal-intercourse-with-butter-lubricant scene? All these questions come rushing together to meet Bergman's answer.

As one academic critic has recently noted, Paul and Jeanne's apartment forms "a desperately narrowed world, reduced … both spatially and temporally." The old closeted heterosexual routine. That two heterosexuals would want a secret affair is entirely plausible, but when the secrecy is extreme (no names), unwarranted—well, an absurdity envelops their closet. It's difficult to comprehend anyone choosing to perform a charade that isn't necessary.

LAST TANGO is to date Bertolucci's most commercial and least affecting film. After a history of delving into the ambiguities and possibilities of sexuality in his previous feature films, Bertolucci suddenly, inexplicably reverses his stand, moves from an oblique to a straight-on perspective. (In a Rolling Stone interview at the time of LAST TANGO's release, he was much more eager to talk about his ongoing Freudian psychoanalysis than about the widespread rumors concerning his bisexuality.) But even the new psychoanalyzed Bertolucci can't resist one provocative image: One of the most effective scenes in LAST TANGO occurs when Paul, visiting the hotel his wife owned and managed before her suicide, meets his wife's lover. The two talk and drink whiskey in the lovers' room, dressed in identical red-plaid bathrobes, robes given to each by Paul's wife.

We feel the loss of oblique angles in LAST TANGO, experience the resulting flatness. LAST TANGO is a lush beautiful movie, a movie on the brink. Its only problem is it never leaps, never soars into the sensual space we sense Bertolucci, of all working directors, could master.

1900

It's impossible to include a definitive examination of gay themes and images in the new 1900 since its impossible to see the film in North America. Prospective distributors mumble a great deal about length, and five hours and twenty minutes is long, but a source at Paramount (which recently waived distribution rights) told me the extremely political nature of the film was probably more to blame.

Originally and more aptly titled NOVECENTO (or TWENTIETH CENTURY or THE NINETEEN HUNDRED), 1900 takes up the twinning motif with a vengeance. Two children, one the son of an Italian landowner, the other the son of one of the landowner's sharecroppers, are born at the same time on the same day. The film presents them in systematic opposition as they grow up together and then apart. 1900 ends on April 25, 1945, Liberation Day, with the peasants briefly seizing control of the region where Olmo and Alfredo have grown up—the Emilia Romagna area that has been socialist ever since socialism, and communist ever since communism. Here the peasants become the film's true protagonists, abruptly severing plot's severe dual structure to celebrate jubilantly their victory over fascism and capitalism. Their joy is brief, however, for on the same day they are ordered by the Committee of National Liberation to surrender control. Bertolucci has called the film as a whole a Gramscian work that presents both "the optimism of the will and the pessimism of reason."

As a critic in Positif notes, for Bertolucci in 1900 the working class has become the embodiment of virility. In one early scene, Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), the sharecropper's son, and Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the landowner's son, compare penis size, and Olmo jokingly notes his is longer because he's a socialist.

Later, Alfredo, exempted from military service, is distraught over the fact that Olmo must go to war and may be killed. The night Olmo is to leave, Alfredo lies down on the railroad tracks and waits for the train that will bear Olmo off to war to pass over him.

But this examination of the obvious sexual aspects of the twinning motif is soon dropped as political concerns escalate, the Positif critic remarks; then it is reinstituted in a radically different context. The rise of fascism in Italy is represented by Attila (played by an eye-rolling Donald Sutherland), the provincial Fascist leader of the Emilia region. With Attila, fascism "becomes bad melodrama where the fascist becomes sexually unbalanced, bloodthirsty, one of his defects being a homosexual inclination for young boys that he rapes and kills." As Bertolucci makes clear in an interview in Cineaste, "Fascists in my movie haven't reached a mature sexuality and so they move in a totally sado-masochistic universe."

Bertolucci goes on to say (to anyone's surprise?): "A Freudian influence is always present in my movies, not because I read Freud, but because I have been undergoing analysis for six years."

Has no one pointed out to Bertolucci that Freudian psychoanalysis is a whole bourgeois cosmology unto itself? He blithely and unquestioningly accepts its central premise that the only mature sexuality is heterosexuality. Does he also mean to indicate that if your sexuality is immature and homosexual, you are concomitantly a closet fascist? Hitler made the reverse charge—if you're queer, you're Bolshevik—and made his point by having nearly a quarter of a million homosexuals executed in Nazi death camps between 1937 and 1945. And how does all this reflect on Bertolucci's mentor, the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, a dedicated Marxist who many people feel was the victim of the Italian neo-fascist movement? I suppose in the Freudian arrangement of things it's still necessary to kill off the father figure, even if someone else has already done it for you.

At the same time as he unquestioningly accepts the Freudian premise that only heterosexuality is mature, Bertolucci, strangely enough, uses Freudian imagery—the old throw-yourself-in-front-of-a-moving-train image (a slight homosexual variation on the heterosexual train-enters-tunnel image in THE CONFORMIST)—to illustrate the binding love between two noble men, Olmo and Alfredo.

All the contradictions, the vacillations, the ambivalences running through his previous films seem to be accentuated, even horribly distorted, in 1900—on the one hand two men of differing classes united by birth and love, on the other the monster-pervert fascist.

DANCE

The image of dance as a visual metaphor for life informs all of Bertolucci's films. In THE GRIM REAPER two teenage girls seek refuge from an afternoon rainstorm in the room of an older woman friend, and there they dance a loose joyous cha-cha to the rhythms of the radio and rain. The gay cruiser leads the police to the murderer—they find the murderer mingling with the dancers at an open-air dance-stand in the same park where he lured the prostitute to her death.

Easter Sunday, after the requisite and over-abundant noon meal, Fabrizio and his Aunt Gina, in what is the most intensely erotic moment in BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, move together in a slinky dance of illicit desire to the soaring banalities of an Italian pop song coming from the radio. For all its unanticipated carnality (they are, after all, just dancing, making love standing up to music), the scene also teeters back and forth between anti-bourgeois satire and unapologetic Oedipal clichés. Grandmother snores upright and open-mouthed in her chair, Grandfather unperturbedly scans the Sunday newspaper, Fabrizio and his aunt move tight into the clinch, Gina's adolescent son observes from the salon door. Gina notices his stare of dawning comprehension and quickly corrects the situation, satisfying, one must note, more than one forbidden desire. Now she dances with the boy, holds him tightly to her breast as Fabrizio looks on. It's a splendid foreshadowing occurring early on; then it's only vaguely recalled in the film's final scene when, just after Fabrizio's wedding, Gina stands in front of the cathedral, arms wrapped tightly around her son, running her fingers back and through his fine dark hair, wets his shoulder with her copious tears.

A blend of eroticism and aggressive defiance attaches itself to the dance, which is apparent in RIGOLETTO, dance having moved from THE GRIM REAPER's unselfconscious cha-cha to the almost motionless coupling of nephew and aunt, aunt and son in BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. The father-hero of RIGOLETTO reeks of bravado as anti-Fascist pretender (our impression of his swaggering admirable boldness stays even after we learn he's a double agent). Appearing at the local Fascist celebration, he strides into an open-sided pavilion, where dancers halt their hard-angled movement in anticipation of the Fascist anthem with its solo cornet. He abruptly takes possession of the nearest woman and waltzes her, thrusts her across the dance floor. I don't know if we respond more to the artifice in Bertolucci's brazenly theatrical set-pieces or to the humor and the daring of movie clichés unexpectedly transformed. The audacity in RIGOLETTO is as much Bertolucci's as the father-hero's.

Anna, the icon of unrepressed desires in THE CONFORMIST, teaches dance. It is Anna who parades Marcello's happily dissembling wife (to her new husband, to Catholic morality, to society itself) about the public dance hall. This scene is so erotically charged and giddily transparent that it reminds us of Marlene Dietrich in MOROCCO, dressed in her cabaret-act tuxedo, first courting and finally kissing a pretty woman in the audience as Gary Cooper looks stoically on. The two women tangoing in THE CONFORMIST provide what is surely the most affirmative (rather than merely easily defiant) image of dance in Bertolucci's work: Dominique Sanda, in a white gown that fairly steams like dry-ice, kneeling down, Jeanne d'Arc before the Dauphin, as Stefania Sandrelli circles her majestically, delightedly. This private tango quickly becomes a swirling chain of dancers, a gracefully seductive spider's web that encircles but does not include the non-dancing Marcello, the man who would be normal.

What has happened between THE CONFORMIST and LAST TANGO IN PARIS is difficult to fathom—the life-giving dance becomes, almost without warning, a danse macabre. Brando and Schneider (for here they go beyond being stars playing roles to roles revealing stars) stumble upon a tango contest. The participants are almost manikins, lacquered with impotency and decay. Brando hauls down his pants and moons this display of mock-passion, a gesture that is an uneasy blend of the father-hero's defiance in RIGOLETTO and Marcello's refusal to participate in the tango in THE CONFORMIST.

A surprising scatological preoccupation seems to have LAST TANGO in its grasp. Brando's bare-ass up-yours-to-the-elbow gesture to the dance of life is one of several visual and verbal equations of anal eroticism with death. Brando tells Schneider she must go "right up the ass of death, right up his ass until you find a womb of fear." And when he assfucks her, we are asked to view the act as humiliating and brutal. Not to mention the awesome tone that pervades the scene in which he solemnly bids her to trim two fingernails so she can stick those two fingers up his ass. (The very presentation of anal sexuality causes certain problems to arise—whether for the filmmaker or for the viewer. Anal intercourse, for instance, is probably generally more acceptable to gay males than it is to the heterosexual population. People who have not experienced anal intercourse or who have found the experience unpleasant rather than pleasurable frequently find it humiliating and in many ways akin to the act of rape. Certainly some heterosexual women see the act as both painful and degrading. Bertolucci's depiction of anal intercourse in LAST TANGO seems to enforce this view.)

The dance of life is found to be decadent and grotesque in LAST TANGO and should therefore be rejected. But it's the only dance there is. Rejecting it means death—Brando-Paul-Father staring incredulously at the gun Schneider-Jeanne-Daughter (or is it Son?) aims and fires. The dance of life may be threateningly carnal, but carnality must finally be redemptive. Paul in LAST TANGO can only join in the dance furtively and can only recreate his fantasy of anonymous passion-fucks in a secret apartment on rue Jules Verne.

The linking of homosexuality and death then emerges as a consistent theme. Agostino kills himself in BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, partly because of his unrequited love for Fabrizio. Marcello in THE CONFORMIST thinks he has killed the chauffeur who attempted to seduce him as a child but is haunted throughout the rest of his life by the combined image of homosexual seduction and death. In 1900, Alfredo's love for Olmo must inevitable become a fatal one, for sexual as well as political reasons. Alfredo seems to worship Olmo's peasant virility and his socialist cock, but Alfredo can only accept his longings for both symbolically-by lying down in front of Olmo's train. And the fascist Attila becomes the final gruesome expression of Bertolucci's sexual phantoms, phantoms that seem half fears, half desires. Attila becomes the ultimate equation-through his sodomizing and then killing of young boys—of homosexuality, decadence, anal intercourse, fascism and death.

What a long way Bertolucci and his films have come from the frightened but brave gay cruiser who becomes the hero of THE GRIM REAPER. What a long way from the tender love of Fabrizio for the boy with hair like canary feathers or from Anna and her triumphantly erotic lesbianism in THE CONFORMIST. We can speculate from the sudden self-important wails of existential despair in LAST TANGO IN PARIS—a quality entirely missing from THE CONFORMIST—that Bertolucci's spiritual and erotic malaise has its source in a director trying to express himself in terms of a passion he does not feel. And, in light of Bertolucci's own comment stated at the beginning of this essay about 1900, were led to wonder if it's only the critics who have been fucked up the ass but refused to come. --Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 16, 1977, pp. 23-26

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Michael
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#32 Post by Michael » Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:06 pm

Dylan, thanks for posting that article. Excellent indeed! It brought me closer to appreciating Bertolucci.

Most (yes, most!) Italian men, especially the married ones, have such a tremendous hang up about homosexuality and I think Bertolucci subtly filters all that through his works.

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#33 Post by Lino » Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:35 pm

Curiously, Bertolucci wanted to make Last Tango a story about a couple of men who met by chance and had a series of sexual encounters for a period of time. Then he decided to change the sex of one of its protagonists because the thought of watching two men fuck simply for the pleasure of it was considered to be very taboo for the mainstream cinema of that time. And I personally doubt he could get the fundings, too.

Well, either way, scandal was born so I guess he should have stuck to his guns and made the damned gay movie. But yeah, Bergman was right.

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#34 Post by David Ehrenstein » Sat Jul 28, 2007 2:42 pm

There is nothing "banal" about the pop songs used in Before the Revolution which are sung by Gino Paoli who cowrote them with Ennio Morricone.

"Agostino" in Before the Revolution is played by Allen Midgette -- an American who had previously appeared in one of the episodes of La Commare Secca and has bit roles in The Spider's Stratagem and 1900.

Midgette went back to America in the mid-60's and appeared in Andy Warhol's monumental 25-hour long ***(Four Stars) in 1967, where he has a very interesting sequence in which he finds himself falling in love with another actor (for real). He famously appeared as Warhol in a publicity tour the artist had arranged for himself.

He also played an Indian in Godard's Wind From the East.

Off screen his lovers have included Jerome Robbins.

Currently he resides in upsate New York.

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Dylan
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#35 Post by Dylan » Sat Jul 28, 2007 3:33 pm

There is nothing "banal" about the pop songs used in Before the Revolution which are sung by Gino Paoli who cowrote them with Ennio Morricone.
It's a beautiful soundtrack.
"Agostino" in Before the Revolution is played by Allen Midgette -- an American who had previously appeared in one of the episodes of La Commare Secca and has bit roles in The Spider's Strategem and 1900.

Midgette went back to America in the mid-60's and appeared in Andy Warhol's monumental 25-hour long ***(Four Stars) in 1967, where he has a very interesting sequence in which he finds himself fallign in love with another actor (for real). He famusly appeared as Warhol in a puiblicity tour the artist had arranged for himself.

He also played an Indian in Godard's Wind From the East.

Off screen his lovers have included Jerome Robbins.

Currently he resides in upsate New York.
Good to know he's still around, I always enjoyed him in the Bertolucci films (the scene in "Before the Revolution" where Agostino is on the bicycle is a classic in my world, and scored by Morricone with a lovely waltz no less).
Curiously, Bertolucci wanted to make Last Tango a story about a couple of men who met by chance and had a series of sexual encounters for a period of time.
Personally, this makes the film more fascinating to me. As far as I know, Bertolucci had changed this long before there was even a treatment, but as Will Aitken points out, much (all?) of the homosexual material and dynamics remain in the interactions between Paul and Jeanne. I had actually thought about this long before I discovered the article.

Meanwhile, I adore the monologues in this film (they're up there with Persona as some of the best-written, performed and shot in cinema). Anybody else find themselves reflecting on Paul and Jeanne's childhood stories? They've always stuck with me.

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#36 Post by MichaelB » Sun Jul 29, 2007 2:36 am

davidhare wrote:
Speaking of which, is Salo still banned in Oz?
The pretext given for banning Salo was that the actors appeared to be or were intended to appear under 18.
...though if that were genuinely the case, there's no way the BBFC would have passed it uncut, as our Protection of Children Act is extremely strict about such things. But that law makes a definite distinction between "appeared to be" and "intended to appear" - the latter is OK, provided they're genuinely over 18.

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#37 Post by David Ehrenstein » Sun Jul 29, 2007 9:08 am

A final note on Bertolucii and Midgette: shortly after Partner, Bertolucci announced that he was developing a project entitled Natura Contra Natura which would star Jean-Pierre Leaud, Lou Castel and Allen Midgette.

It was never made.

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#38 Post by ellipsis7 » Sun Jul 29, 2007 10:34 am

Sidebar story...
Room for a little one

Viv Groskop
Sunday July 29, 2007

Baby driving you bonkers? Take her to see a sex film

The attractive young American at the front of the ticket queue in London's BFI Southbank was not happy about being refused entrance. 'Sir, I'm afraid this is a parent and baby screening,' the cashier said sheepishly. 'What?' the customer exploded, incredulous. 'But I asked for Last Tango in Paris.' 'Yes, I know, sir. That is the parent-and-baby screening.' The cashier gestured to me. I was standing behind him with a 12-month-old in a buggy. I blushed. The man looked appalled. It might sound unusual - perverse, even - but this week saw what must be an unprecedented event in the world of parent and baby cinema screenings, as part of BFI Southbank's Marlon Brando season.

These screenings are commonplace across the country: most cinemas hold one a week for parents with babies under one or two years, usually on a weekday morning. The babies holler and whinge throughout, you miss most of the film. And usually they show humdrum, PG-rated films you probably wouldn't want to see anyway.

In the event, though, Bertolucci's depressing and strange, erotic 1972 classic did not prove a big draw for the under-twos. There was only one other mother in the auditorium with her five-month-old. A few others booked, apparently, but didn't turn up. I had not seen the film before and was quite excited. But I was also anticipating an early walk-out due to unsuitability and/ or vomiting (not me, the baby).

Fortunately, thanks to a strategic yoghurt overdose, baby Vera fell asleep in the first five minutes. This was precisely one minute before the two protagonists began having sex, despite having only just met. Their grunting was punctuated by the sound of the baby in the row behind sucking its bottle with equal enthusiasm.

Weirdly, Last Tango in Paris turned out to be the perfect film to watch with a baby. It is very darkly shot, with no sudden flashes of light. The soundtrack has no loud surprises, there is a lot of soothing saxophone and violin music. Vera remained sound asleep right to the end - even through the infamously gruesome butter scene.

And while my daughter was sleeping, I picked up some life lessons. Grief does funny things to people. Never trust anyone who won't tell you their name. And, if you're an actor, turn down scripts which mention flatulent pigs - or innovative butter use. More adventurous parent and baby classics, please. Maybe A Clockwork Orange next? Or Blue Velvet?

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#39 Post by Dr. Snaut » Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:51 am

Where can I find the Pauline Kael review of LTIP? The link in one of the previous posts is dead.

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#40 Post by tojoed » Fri Jun 19, 2009 6:00 am

Dr. Snaut wrote:Where can I find the Pauline Kael review of LTIP? The link in one of the previous posts is dead.
Here you go.

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#41 Post by HerrSchreck » Fri Jun 19, 2009 1:59 pm

It's funny, I usedta love Last Tango-- I watched it again a month or two ago for the first time in years (I had to dig the fricking Vee Eightch Ess out.. that'll tell you how long its been), and found the whole thing flighty and a touch absurd. It felt dated and silly, primarily because of Brando's self-involved, self-worshipping/loathing performance. For the first time in my life, it was all a bit much.

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Dylan
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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#42 Post by Dylan » Fri Jun 19, 2009 7:59 pm

Schreck, by saying you dug out the "Vee Eightch Ess," does that mean you watched it in pan/scan? I've seen a few seconds of this in pan/scan on TV and it absolutely ruins Storaro's photography. The DVD is letterboxed but excessively grainy. I've seen this film projected and the colors were lush and rich, so I look forward to an accurate representation of the new 35mm print on the SE DVD.
I'm still waiting to see Berto's real gay movie - maybe one day?
At this point, I'd settle with anything new from Bertolucci, but I hear he's suffering from some terrible back problems, which is partially why Bel Canto was held back. But he's been working very slowly anyway: five years passed between Besieged and The Dreamers, and now it's been six years. IMDB lists an "Untitled Bernardo Bertolucci Project (2011)" on his page, but who knows what the status of that is.

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Dr. Snaut
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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#43 Post by Dr. Snaut » Sat Jun 20, 2009 2:09 am

Dylan - Do you mean the current special edition of Tango? Or is there another re-release on DVD in the works based on a "new print"?

Although not perfect, the Region 1 DVD is quite acceptable.

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Dylan
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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#44 Post by Dylan » Sat Jun 20, 2009 8:08 am

I remember reading on this forum not too long ago that an SE will be released later this year. The 1998 DVD looks decent enough, but does not equal the print I saw in the theater.

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1972)

#45 Post by HerrSchreck » Sat Jun 20, 2009 9:39 am

Dylan-- I've seen the film many times in just about every venue: I saw it in arthouse cinema on revival, on tv, and on my old VHS. So yep I've seen it in glorious widescreen, and Storaro's work on this film is-- as it is in almost everything he's done-- breathtaking. And as is usual for Storaro's use of ligthing, movement and framing, the camera work in the movie enriches the movie (as it almost always does in movies shot by him in his prime) with a fabulous sense of depth. It proves that Storaro never engages in pictorialism for its own sake (I've heard it said La Conformista was merely a series of shots insearch of a movie-- also heard that it was pure style in search of subtsance... neither of which I agree with: I think Conformist is a masterpiece plain and simple)... I think his work here in this film is quite a bit subdued, at least versus the bulk of the rest of his work with BB.

Know beyond all things that I, when in my twenties and early thirties, was a disciple of Brando-- it started I guess when I was in my late teens and I discovered his performance in Streetcar at precisely the same time that I went through a stint of acting. To me Brando was like a god or something-- Tango, Streetcar, Apocalypse, Waterfront, Godfather, The Men, Viva Z, almost everything the guy did I loved.. he could light up mediocre material and even save a bad film, even if only for the few moments (The Formula) that he crackled up there on the screen with his electricity.The man had enough natural charisma to illuminate several cities, all with their own superdomes.

I'm zeroing in on Brando because my problem with the film stems from his performance, and the room temperature of his presence in each scene that he appears. I used to see the film as an excellent rendering of the torment resident in every strong, sensitive, self-aware male, the agony of the process of 'being', for the finer mind, the man who outwardly may have once ruled the coop as a social & sexual conqueror but inwardly is going completely to pieces, who in all actuality never was in one piece.. has been shattered since the crib-- a real piece of psychological reality, a brave warts and all exhibition of the fears, weakness, and power of A Man... in this case a Man In Decline. Back then the movie was significant because (never mind the sex) of the kind of man it seemed to portray, the kind of vibe he carried-- he was intelligent, he was handsome, he stood apart, he was cool, he was cultured, he was sexually powerful, he was socially acceptable to the bourgeoise (at least he physically looked that way), yet he thought life and the world were a bunch of meaningless shit... and he was NOT a hippie. In essence, a grown up James Dean.. complete with the brokenhearted vulnerability. An iconographical image, however.

My problem with the film now is precisely that-- I think Brando is playing Brando the celebrity, not a normal human being. Celebrity rental in a shabby hotel, celebrity flirting, celebrity "go fetch me the butter", celebrity "YOU CUNT!!!" under the subway el, etc. The way he strides through the film like a tsar or a prince or a bishop, strutting and bullshitting and condescending to everybody, it reads alternately riveting and ridiculous. Some of the scenes where he breaks down remain genuinely moving. Some of the scenes are genuinely cool & give me a jivey chuckle. But many of the scenes to me require you to buy into Brando's star power-- if you don't you'd simply look at the guy and say "..this guy for real?" And even though I mostly enjoy buying into Brandos star power (he had oodles), I still have to confess pure star power is not 'character'. Late in his career Brando could get lazy and lean heavily on his star power... he knew it was a powerful commodity and that it could carry him quite a ways through all of his performances, being used to greater and lesser degrees in each. Know however that this is a facade, this supercharismatic man who knows when all eyes are on him, admiring the badass walking statue-- like a hustler on the street working a mark, turning the bullshit on and off for effect.

The wind up is I see Paul as a thin, hugely uneven character in a film that's trying to nudge a greater meaning out of him in combination with the surroundings and the mise en scene. Some scenes are great in that you see Brando airing out some of his inner demons and really letting his guts flow. But they seem so completely "Brando" they almost feel like mawkish moments of rumination between takes.

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

#47 Post by nycmagus » Thu Mar 26, 2015 8:48 pm

To my dear friend David Hare whom I have not spoken to in ages:

Bertolucci did make his great gay movie and it is LAST TANGO IN PARIS. He also killed the queer impulse in his work in its crib right after delivering it, but then nobody's perfect.

In fact, LAST TANGO is one of the great queer movies of the 1970's -- that brief period when queer cinema almost took off (CRUISING is the stake-in-the-heart delivered in 1980). By many standards, LTIP is a failure -- Bertolucci melded the traditions of European and American cinema and the result was lumpy -- he would become much better at it in subsequent films as he learned to smooth the product -- lessening the queerness, but increasing its viability, appeal and stylishness.

But the failure of LTIP in certain areas produced a successful work of queer art -- the queer art of failure as Judith/Jack Halberstam would have it (Visconti could never bring himself to fail in this particular fashion -- instead he threw fabulous Romantic Modernist funerals for aesthetic traditions he knew should not outlive him).

To read the feelings expressed on this site and others across the Web about LTIP is to read of deep engagement with a film that both satisfies and disappoints, as it promises certain things and delivers others. Here is a film whose look was based on the paintings of Francis Bacon -- how queer can you get -- about hetero sex -- but whose first sexual encounter is a representation of a gay pick-up par excellence. The movie refuses to settle down and cohere in the prescribed fashion -- it will not in other words die (until the final scene when Bertolucci reneges on all that has come up until then). Nor will it behave the way a film up until that time was supposed to -- just as you and I and many more refused to behave, but still managed to produce a (new) coherence.

Jonathan Dollimore ("Desire, Death, and Loss in Western Culture") writes: “If in homoerotic writing we find insightful contemporary explorations of the Western preoccupation with convergence of desire and death, we also find a compelling alternative to it” For Dollimore, the promiscuous sexual encounter allows for “simultaneous identification and disidentification, which, together, may then involve a re-identification--ceasing to be the fixed, tyrannized subject” and so, contra Leo Bersani, the rectum is not a grave.

For 127 minutes, Bertolucci promiscuously plays around with Dollimore's alternative -- mating Classical Hollywood with the New Wave and envisioning queer sex among heteros -- LTIP is the least anxious movie he ever made. That Bertolucci retreats in the film's last two minutes -- that he fails to maintain his failure -- that "Paul" is the name that dare not speak itself -- is forgivable when understood in light of all the queer wonder that came before.


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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

#49 Post by oh yeah » Sat Dec 03, 2016 8:01 pm

Bertolucci can go fuck himself. He seems to have no regret for his actions, simply because it (supposedly) aided in producing Great Art. He reads like a parody here of the demanding, cold, amoral, pretentious artiste. Except it's not funny, just disgusting. It would not be a huge exaggeration to say that he ruined Maria's life. And he wonders why she hated him forever after?

All the insightful and eloquent thoughts in this thread about beautiful lighting and framing and acting just read as poison to me now. This film is toxic.

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Re: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

#50 Post by Cremildo » Sat Dec 03, 2016 8:06 pm

Lack of work ethics and abuse of trust of an actress, no doubt. But now ravenous SJWs like Jessica Chastain are shaming people who like the film because it has a "real rape" scene. Give me a break. Schneider herself admitted the whole thing was simulated. It's one thing to criticize Bertolucci and Brando for their crassness - perhaps even abuse - and another altogether to say they committed a crime as hideous as rape.

I suggest Americans who own it on DVD or Blu-ray to treasure their copies and maybe hide them, because the PC outrage brigade will certainly ban the film from stores now.
Last edited by Cremildo on Sat Dec 03, 2016 8:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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