Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [123]
With a script by Bertolucci and Franco Arcali, Last Tango in Paris told the story of Paul (Marlon Brando), a forty-five-year-old American living in Paris who has reached a critical juncture in his life. He and his wife have run a flea-trap hotel, where the wife often conducted affairs right under Paul’s nose, including one with a long-term resident of the hotel. As the film opens, Paul’s wife has died—a suicide, though the details are intentionally murky. While perusing a vacant apartment he is thinking of renting, he encounters Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a twenty-year-old Parisian girl who is also looking at the apartment. Their attraction to each other is instantaneous, and they surrender to it with total abandon, having sex in the empty apartment. Paul persuades her that they must not know anything about each other—they must not even reveal their names. Paul rents the place, and for several days they meet to have sex. But it wasn’t like the sex that had ever been portrayed on the screen before: Because of the emotional intensity behind it, nothing like it had been seen even in a hardcore porn film. Last Tango’s most famous moment—when Paul uses a stick of butter to lubricate his sodomy of Jeanne—was hardly the most shocking thing in the film. “Everything outside this place is bullshit,” says Paul, as he presses Jeanne to confront her inner core for the first time. He induces her to stick two fingers up his ass. He tells her that he’s going to get a pig to fuck her; that he’ll vomit in her face and make her swallow the vomit. “Are you going to do all that for me?” she asks. This dialogue stunned the audience, unaccustomed to seeing and hearing real intimacy between a man and a woman on the screen. (It’s possible that the most intimate scenes prior to the ones between Paul and Jeanne had been those featuring Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret in the decidedly G-rated Ship of Fools.)
Midway through the picture there is a shattering scene in which Paul rails at the corpse of his wife, laid out in the funeral parlor. He tells her that he could never, ever have discovered the truth about her. She was dishonest with him from the beginning—dirtier than the dirtiest street pig, he tells her. He hopes she rots in hell, because “our marriage was nothing more than a foxhole for you, and all it took for you to get out was a thirty-five-cent razor and a tub full of water.” Paul is losing himself in Jeanne, attempting to find the truth through erotic means. “Listen, you dumb dodo,” he tells her, when she keeps protesting that she’s really in love with her young television filmmaker boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Léaud), “all the mysteries that you’re ever going to get to know in life are right here.”
The scene at the casket was a history-making moment in world cinema. It was doubtful that any screen actor had ever exposed himself so completely and pitilessly as Brando did in that scene; it made his very fine work in The Godfather look like child’s play—a harmless exercise.
When the lights came on after Last Tango in Paris at the New York Film Festival screening, Pauline was almost speechless. Her friend George Malko, who accompanied her to it, recalled her as being “drenched”—unable even to go out for a drink with him to discuss it afterward. Pauline recalled that there was very little chatter among the critics at the party following the screening; most people seemed to be in a state of shock.
Most of the critics planned to wait to review Last Tango until it had opened in Italy and then officially in New York in January. But Pauline could not wait; she retired to her desk at the Turin and wrote her lengthy review as if in one great gasp. Her review had to be a masterpiece—it was, as far as she was concerned, the most important