We see both of them (as they don’t see each other) in their normal lives-Paul back at the flophouse-hotel his wife owned, Jeanne with her mother, the widow of a colonel, and with her adoring fiance (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a TV director, who is relentlessly shooting a sixteen-millimeter film about her, a film that is to end in a week with their wedding. She wants to know who he is, but he insists that sex is all that matters. He rents the flat, and for three days they meet there. They have sex in an empty room, without knowing anything about each other-not even first names. He goes to look at an empty flat and meets Jeanne, who is also looking at it. When his wife commits suicide, Paul, an American living in Paris, tries to get away from his life. The script (which Bertolucci wrote with Franco Arcalli) is in French and English it centers on a man’s attempt to separate sex from everything else. Bertolucci shows his masterly elegance in Last Tango in Paris, but he also reveals a master’s substance.
What nobody had talked about was a sex film that would churn-up everybody’s emotions. But I think those of us who had speculated about erotic movies had tended to think of them in terms of Terry Southern’s deliriously comic novel on the subject, Blue Movies we had expected artistic blue movies, talented directors taking over from the Schlockmeisters and making sophisticated voyeuristic fantasies that would be gorgeous fun-a real turn-on. Many of us expected eroticism to come to the movies, and some of us had even guessed that it might come from Bertolucci, because he seemed to have the elegance and the richness and the sensuality to make lushly erotic movies. Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.
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This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made, and so it’s probably only natural that an audience, anticipating a voluptuous feast from the man who made The Conformist, and confronted with this unexpected sexuality and the new realism it requires of the actors, should go into shock. Carried along by the sustained excitement of the movie, the audience had given Bertolucci an ovation, but afterward, as individuals, they were quiet.
Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives. Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex-sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. 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. 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.
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