Last Tango in Paris (Italian: Ultimo tango a Parigi; French: Le Dernier Tango à Paris) is a 1972 erotic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The film stars Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre LÃaud, and portrays a recently widowed American who begins an anonymous sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman.
Last Tango In Paris
Paul later meets Jeanne on the street and says he wants to renew the relationship. He tells her of the recent tragedy of his wife. As he tells his life story, they walk into a tango bar, where he continues telling her about himself. The loss of anonymity disillusions Jeanne about their relationship. She tells Paul she does not want to see him again. Paul, not wanting to let Jeanne go, chases her through the streets of Paris. While running, she continually yells at him to go away and tells him that their relationship is over. Despite her threats to call the police, he chases her all the way back to her building and forces his way into her apartment. He mocks her for running away from him, followed by him saying he loves her and wants to know her name.
Bertolucci took Marlon Brando to the Bacon exhibit and told Brando that he "wanted him to compare himself with Bacon's human figures because I felt that, like them, Marlon's face and body were characterized by a strange and infernal plasticity. I wanted Paul to be like the figures that obsessively return in Bacon: faces eaten by something coming from the inside."[26]
The film score was composed by Gato Barbieri, arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson, and the soundtrack album was released on the United Artists label.[30][31] AllMusic's Richie Unterberger noted "Although some of the smoky sax solos get a little uncomfortably close to 1970s fusion clichÃ, Gato Barbieri's score to Bertolucci's 1972 classic is an overall triumph. Suspenseful jazz, melancholy orchestration, and actual tangos fit the film's air of erotic longing, melancholy despair, and doomed fate".[29] The soundtrack includes "Six Penny Ride" by Trevor Duncan (1924-2005).
We learn about them. He is an American, living in Paris these last several years with a French wife who owned a hotel that is not quite a whorehouse. On the day the movie begins, the wife has committed suicide. We are never quite sure why, although by the time the movie is over we have a few depressing clues.
"Last Tango" premiered, in case you have forgotten, on Oct. 14, 1972. It did not quite become a landmark. It was not the beginning of something new, but the triumph of something old -- the "art film," which was soon to be replaced by the complete victory of mass-marketed "event films." The shocking sexual energy of "Last Tango in Paris" and the daring of Marlon Brando and the unknown Maria Schneider did not lead to an adult art cinema. The movie frightened off imitators, and instead of being the first of many X-rated films dealing honestly with sexuality, it became almost the last. Hollywood made a quick U-turn into movies about teenagers, technology, action heroes and special effects. And with the exception of a few isolated films like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988) and "In the Realm of the Senses" (1976), the serious use of graphic sexuality all but disappeared from the screen.
The ending. The scene in the tango hall is still haunting, still part of the whole movement of the third act of the film, in which Paul, having created a searing moment out of time, now throws it away in drunken banality. The following scenes, leading to the unexpected events in the apartment of Jeanne's mother, strike me as arbitrary and contrived. But still Brando finds a way to redeem them, carefully remembering to park his gum before the most important moment of his life.
On a purely narrative level, one could say that not much happens in a scene like this--the two main charactersof the film meet by chance. But visually the scene is dynamic. Look at the way it is set up. The tramway bridge above allows for the opening shot of Paul's anguished cry (could Bertolucci's inspiration for this have been spontaneous, after he had already chosen the location because of its long walkway?). Below, that long concourseallows the camera to track bothcharacters as they move from background to foreground and then overlap. The space is so long that the camera is able to switch directions after the two pass each other and still find plenty of room in the other direction. The camera's movement throughout this scene is deft as well as graceful. We first saw it come down toward Brando's character from the top. It curved subtly and expertly, but its movement was quick--even aggressive. These qualities characterize the movements of the tango, which you will see the two main characters perform at the end of the film. The dance is a powerful scene, because it finally iterates what has been suggested all along in the film's choreography--both in the movements of the camera and of the characters. We feel swept away by the beauty of the tango despite the tragic quality of the events it accompanies.
Although some of the smoky sax solos get a little uncomfortably close to 1970s fusion clichÃ, Gato Barbieri's score to Bertolucci's 1972 classic is an overall triumph. Suspenseful jazz, melancholy orchestration, and actual tangos fit the film's air of erotic longing, melancholy despair, and doomed fate. "Last Tango in Paris" is a particular standout, its orgiastic, wordless vocal yelps reflecting, whether by design or not, the actual content of the movie. The 1998 CD reissue is by no means just a substitute for the old vinyl; it more than doubles the length of the original release with a "Last Tango in Paris Suite," put together by Barbieri himself from 29 cues from the original score as used in the film.
The rape scene received new criticism in 2016 when the Spanish nonprofit El Mundo de Alycia posted unseen footage of Bertolucci speaking about "Last Tango in Paris" in honor of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The director acknowledged that the use of butter was a last minute addition that he and Brando willingly withheld from Schneider because they wanted her to have an authentic onscreen reaction. "I wanted her to react humiliated ... I wanted Maria to feel, not to act," he said; he also wanted her to respond as a "girl, not an actress." Bertolucci insisted that he had no regrets about the way he shot the scene.
Bertolucci deserves ever-lasting gratitude for pursuing those questions. (Upon the film's premiere, Robert Altman exclaimed to Newsweek magazine, "What do the rest of us [filmmakers] think we're doing?")
In 1975, Schneider featured in Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger," a wandering existential drama starring Jack Nicholson as a frustrated and erratic war correspondent. Her last movie,"The Key," by director Guillaume Nicloux, came out in 2007.
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