Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [124]
The intensity of her response worked both for and against her, winning her a deeper level of loyalty from her New Yorker readers who were swept along by her passion for the film, yet ultimately alienating those who felt she had simply overpraised it. Perhaps not even William Shawn was prepared for her opening:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972; that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. The movie breakthrough has finally come.
The strange, mysterious relationship of sex to intimacy—and the ways in which the two simultaneously feed and contradict each other—was one of the most powerful themes in Last Tango, and it was one that Pauline responded to with her whole being. She had a deep respect for the nature of genuine sexual bliss, the eagerness to engage, however fleetingly, in complete surrender to another. As she sat in the darkness at Lincoln Center, dazzled by what was unfolding on the screen, she knew she was witnessing a revolutionary step in the portrayal of human emotions, and that it would be pointless to write about the film with anything less than total abandon.
Brando’s performance stunned her. In her review she called up her memory of seeing him on Broadway in Truckline Café back in 1946—a performance so visceral that she had thought he was “having a seizure onstage.” His work in Last Tango was the most revealing work she had ever seen an actor do onscreen. His performance as Paul was “a study of the aggression in masculine sexuality, and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity. If Brando knows this hell, why should we pretend we don’t?”
She worried that Last Tango would be misunderstood, feared, dismissed. She worried that “Americans seem to have lost the capacity for being scandalized”—in other words, that audiences had become numb to raw emotion. They needed to grant themselves the freedom to respond wholeheartedly to the movie, that it “might have been easier on some if they could have thrown things,” as the audience had on opening night of Le Sacre du Printemps, because she felt that “this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies.” And in the final paragraph of her review, she bared herself to her readers, much as Paul encouraged Jeanne to bare herself to him: “I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing.”
Her concern that Last Tango would be misunderstood turned out to be justified. The only other major reviewer who covered its opening at the festival was Vincent Canby, who expressed very mixed feelings about it. Once the film had its official New York opening at the Trans Lux Theater on the East Side of Manhattan, many of the reviews referred, somewhat derisively, to Pauline’s rhapsodic enthusiasm. The final tally, according to The New York Times, was twelve favorable, five mixed (including Stanley Kauffmann and Rex Reed), and two negative (John Simon and WPIX’s Jeffrey Lyons).
Pauline’s review of Last Tango did more than anything else to date to boost her reputation as the era’s wisest and most searching film critic. United Artists took out a hugely expensive two-page advertisement in The New York Times in which her review was reprinted in its entirety. But her impassioned advocacy for the film ultimately worked against her in some ways. She had gone farther out on a limb with her review