The father of a websit reader recently passed and, after going through his possessions, she asked me if I would like some of his DVDs. I selected six, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972).
I had seen Last Tango in Paris maybe three times in my life, each time after reading something about it. The last time I watched the film was almost fifteen years ago, after reading Pauline Kael's October 28, 1972 review in the New Yorker, which, coincidentally, I found while going through my own late-father's possessions. Last night I began watching the film for a fourth time, this time after reading about Twitter's plan to prompt users whose tweets were considered "mean" or "hateful."
Last Tango in Paris is a very different film today than it was in 1972, owing in part to Maria Schneider's comments about what happened during its production ("I felt raped by Brando"), and because films today are not so much hand-sewn, with breathing space between their stitches, but pasted together with zeroes and ones -- a difference that never fails to surprise me and one that I find refreshing.
There are so many things to see in Last Tango in Paris, so many details. Some of them offensive, in the way our world can be offensive, some of them benign, in the way a tumour can be non-malignant. If you despise Bertolucci and Brando, it is likely you will admire Agnès Varda -- and yet there she is in the opening credits, as a "Dialogue" contributor. If you are a pro-sex feminist to Bertolucci's pornographer, you will appreciate filmmaker Catherine Breillat, who appears as "Mouchette" five years after Robert Bresson's self-proclaimed "Christian and sadistic" film of the same name.
Something I hadn't remembered during the opening credits is the appearance of two Francis Bacon paintings. Bertolucci made his own "Bacon" twenty minutes into the film with the shot that opens this post.
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