Last Tango in Paris

Saw Last Tango in Paris. The film opens with a long credit sequence set to jazz, against a backdrop of impressionist paintings. The credits roll for about five minutes and then the film opens with Marlon Brando screaming "Fuck!" into the camera. This sets up the central theme of the film: of art and sophistication vs authenticity and brutishness. Brando plays a recently windowed man whose wife killed herself. She had apparently had several lovers, all of whom Brando knew about. He becomes disgusted with himself and then with the world for having fooled himself into thinking that accepting his wife's lovers was a mark of progressive sophistication. Seemingly resolved to never fall into the trap of sophistication again, he becomes incredibly self-indulgent and tries to turn into a kind of beautiful-animal-style of man.

Meanwhile, Jeanne, a young woman with a film-making boyfriend tries to make some kind of relationship with Brando. She is natural and sweet. She tries to find out more about Brando's thoughts and feelings, but either out of fear of intimacy or out of a desire for further brutishness, he mocks her and teases her. She becomes his sort-of toy. He confuses and annoys her, pulling her back with sweetness whenever she gets fed up. He seems to be trying to get her to join him in his squalor. She is completely intoxicated by his brutish, brutal honesty (in comparison to which her boyfriend seems hopelessly boyish and pretentious) but simultaneously repulsed by his flippant cruelty and infrequent but frank abuse; abuse which she projects upon her film-making boyfriend. (She has conflated emotional exploitation for physical exploitation.)

The film presents this art vs nature conflict in a very subtle manner however, full of contradictions and reversals (and mirrors, which provide hints for all of this.) For example: Jeanne is very genuine throughout the relationship. Her desire for intimacy is of course perfectly natural and it is Brando's supposed brutally honest pose which shuts her down. Her boyfriend talks fussily of art and maturity but is, in his own way, far less pretentious than Brando whose every action is calculated and perversely unnatural.

It is my interpretation of the film that Brando's reaction against intellectual sophistication throws out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, he rejects pleasant-sounding idealism, but he also rejects the polite lies that make society function. By rejecting idealism, he paradoxically becomes the greatest idealist in the film: an idealist who believes that he can function without ideas, without dreams, without love.

The film is fairly listless, giving off the feeling of talking with an interesting but sort of disagreeable roommate on a rainy day. I get a claustrophobic feeling of being trapped against ideas I don't really like thinking about. The film is also centrally focused on the relationship between Brando and Jeanne. It is abusive at parts and kind of hard to watch, but it is also fascinating to watch them as they push and pull each other, parting and rejoining. Seen in retrospect, at the end of the film, it is a kind of dance.

Edit: Ho ho! What could have been!