LAST TANGO IN PARIS
A film review by Ralf Benner
Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner
Two of the best writers in America have written the two most famous reviews of Bernardo Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS: Pauline Kael's "Tango," published in the 10/28/72 edition of The New Yorker (and reprinted in REELING and FOR KEEPS) and from Norman Mailer for the 5/17/73 edition of the New York Review of Books, A TRANSIT TO NARCISSUS, changed to "Tango, Last Tango" for his1982 collection of essays entitled PIECES. Both reviews may be thousands of words too long, but each has made some startling comments that we wouldn't be wrong in guessing the writers now wish they hadn't so emphatically divined. Kael calls LAST TANGO IN PARIIS the "most powerfully erotic" and "the most liberating" movie ever made. It is, as we know by now, neither, and in his autobio, Marlon Brando also doubts the worthiness of such masturbatory praise. And Mailer cuts the Empress down as "the first frigid of film critics," which, however badly he might want it so, isn't true. (If he had intimated suspicions of movie-inspired lesbianism, citing some of the endless examples of her wet panty descriptions of femmes, and noting that she was once married to a gay filmmaker, his sarcasm might have been at least funny.) Of the two pieces, Kael's is the more consumable, though minus Mailer's freedom to repeat the movie's infamous obscenities because, unlike Tina Brown's New Yorker, William Shawn had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the slang of the late 20th Century. And hers more panting: you can nearly see Kael climaxing on her yellow pad; there's little doubt that her pen substitutes for Marlon Brando's stick. The review might have been more deliciously autobiographical if she had flatly admitted her zipless encounters; instead, she broadens the sex with no names as universal passage, which, I'd have to concede, is true in my case, and one assumes in hers, and perhaps yours, but not the experience of all others. Essentially, the piece tells us that we shouldn't fear our inexplicably seedy biological appetites.
Mailer's meandering text is a tax on our tolerances but, in the major surprise of both reviews, he gets to the core problem of the movie, one Kael doesn't even acknowledge as short coming: Writes Mailer, "Yet as the film progresses with every skill in evidence, while Brando gives a performance that is unforgettable, as the historic buggeries and reamings are delivered, and the language breaks through barriers not even yet erected--no general of censorship could know the armies of obscenity were so near!--as these shocks multiply, and lust goes up the steps to love, something bizarre happens to the film. It fails to explode. It is a warehouse of dynamite and yet something goes wrong with the blow-up...One leaves the theater bewildered. A fuse was never ignited." This is the Mailer of choice; he gets right to it, really sticking it to the hyperbolists. Then he pulls a typical macho Mailerism: he tells us that the more serious problem is that the simulated sex isn't real, it's solo--it's Brando solo. Well, as I see it, Mailer, who's preoccupied with his adolescent, perhaps homoerotic desire to compare his with Brando's--in his book Marlon explains why Mailer wasn't given the chance--and Kael, who can't get past her own lust to have Brando plow her, ignore what's even more obvious: LAST TANGO IN PARIS was originally conceived as and remains a story about two men.
In their frenzy to be as hip as the participates of the sexual revolution of the 70s, when the white class mirrored gay promiscuity, Kael and Mailer avoid--either by design or rare involuntary nescience--what's patent: that Marlon Brando's Paul and Maria Schneider's Jeanne are the improvised heterosexualization of quickie, nameless male-only sex, which came long before Erica Jong's discovery of zipless joy. What other way is there to make sense of the debasement? Buttering up Jeanne's tempting ass isn't exclusively a purge of Paul's torments--as Richard Schickel suggests in "Intimate Strangers"--it's what he most likely desires for himself. And Jeanne's fingers no doubt an unsatisfying phallic substitute. As the degradation continues, Paul finds that he's falling in love with Jeanne, but it seems more an escape than revelation of love through sleazy eroticism. What could he love about her that isn't a lifetime of repressed regrets? It's the finale that reduces the movie's punch, and, where Kael implicitly approves, Mailer explicitly finds it objectionable, as he should, pointing out that Paul's death is the same death that concludes the original conception of LAST TANGO IN PARIS. Through improvisation, to make sense of the death within the perimeters of loose scripting and acting, Brando and Schneider try to legitimize Bertolucci's retribution. The damnedest thing happens: Paul is punished for finding love. It might have worked had Paul met his match in another man; he'd be both unable to accept his attraction yet also be so sexually heated by what he may be repelled by. It could then be possible for Paul to consciously or subconsciously want his nameless lover to kill him as a means to resolve what he has no other way of resolving. Schickel calls his solution "heroic." Death as answer to unfulfilled love or desire isn't genuine heroism but waste.
Kael and Mailer avoid Jeanne's line to Paul: "You hate women." That's not to say she's calling Paul a homosexual, but coming close to what he may be feeling at the moment--despairingly misogynistic: his wife a two-timing hag who has just committed suicide, his wife's mother a religious fool, his wife's friends are whores (one looking like Barbara Jefford) and losers. Brando improvises Paul as angry failure: when he says not exactly to but of his wife's lover, "I wonder what she ever saw in you," it's recognition of self-disgust. Jeanne also calls Paul an "egotist," and he certainly is--smitten by the exciting dangers of dominance: when Jeanne, in an elevator, lifts up her dress to reveal her love mound, it's practically a daughter's incestuous teasing of Big Daddy. (Vittorio Storaro captures this sexual inflation when his camera scans Brando's huge neck and a not quite self-satisfied smile of perhaps a sadist, or when showing Brando's menacing back: in white T-shirt, it looks to have built-in the curvatures of a nuclear power station's smoke stack.) For some, their infantile, petulant, dangerous fantasy will be highly eroticizing, and in Jeanne's case, as Schneider plays her, it's honest: the underlining complexity of what appears to be simple nameless sex overtakes her; she's at once liberated by yet also fearful of the powers of primal urges. Her accelerated animalism pops up in sudden but correlative ways: in a subway with her young fiance, she quarrels with him and they slap at each other, only to fall in each other's arms. The movie bogs down when Jeanne's movie maker of a boyfriend intrudes, but during these sequences, we gaze at Schneider, who's like a slimmed down Rubenseque Claudia Cardinale as child of trash; her baby face is without defining features--her sinuses seem to have a grass-induced puffiness--and her boobs, despite Paul's prognostication of their future, already ready for the soccer field. Mailer's macho gets it right: Schneider "has nose appeal--you can smell her."
But not the right scent for Brando. Everything about his Paul reeks with malice towards women. It's clear he's on the run from the rancid aromas of the bitches in his life; his need for raunchy degradation confirms it. This kind of emotionalism engenders unexpected, unsolicited sex--often between men. And not solely homosexual men: sex between otherwise straight men is probably a matter of accidental timing, happening when all the extrinsic elements of situations beyond their control merge. A long time friend once remarked that a "stiff joint has no conscience," and some thirty years later, that truism is stronger than ever: no matter our moralistic prejudices and "nevers," there's no way we can ever be sure how we'll respond when the adrenergic forces of circumstance and sex take charge, when the flush of a bulge takes charge. (One of the most powerful erotic impulses of gang banging is that men follow and experience the heat generated by the first bangers--they're turned on by each other, not the receptacle of their emissions.) Brando says in his book that the role of Paul was so emotionally draining that he'd never want to go through that kind of pain again, and while you believe it, you have to ask: just how honest is his creation? About LAST TANGO IN PARIS, director Ingmar Bergman said, "As it is now, it makes no sense as a film. I don't think it's really about a middle-aged man and young girl, but about homosexuals. If you think about it in those terms, it becomes interesting." I'd argue that the movie isn't about gays--it's about a sensualist's idea of two men meeting and fighting to the death their attractions to one another. This might explain Brando's drainage: he's invested so much heavy-weight improv on top of a shaky foundation that his house of character collapses. Brando goes as far into improv as he'd allow himself to go; any further and we'd all spill over into uncontrolled derision because his sublimation feels dishonest. We keep thinking that, despite his mastery of the creative self-consciousness of his acting, which might also be the exposure of the dissipation caused by the burden of real-life regrets, he's saying, "I can't go that far, I can't give you what seems clear about Paul." Kael suggests that Brando is photographed looking "ravaged, like the Francis Bacon painting under the film's opening titles." He's ravaged, all right, and as sadistic, but not nearly as sexually disjunctive. (It is the second Francis Bacon painting used during the credits that is more intriguing: the figure sitting on a wooden chair, with arms and legs crossed, looks to have been the inspiration for the caricature drawn of Kael for the 8/14/80 N.Y. Review of Books demolition job done on her by Renata Adler.) And, despite a debauched appearance suggesting the early stages of gluttony, Brando's voice, getting even smaller and more limited as the weight increases, doesn't lend itself to the unrestricted framework of improv; it needs as much discipline as it can get. While Larry King's recent ninety-minute interview with Brando was occasionally amusing--especially the fast slipping in of an eight-letter naughty and the concluding kiss--it proved the actor isn't capable of impromptu lies: he told Larry he's never been depressed and one look at him tells us otherwise.
Despite Mailer's once-held belief that the future of movies is in improvisation, no one would loves them as an eclectic art form could possibly wish for a steady diet of meaninglessness and hyped emotions on rampages--we're getting more than enough of all of this on the news and talk shows. There are reasons why improv works for comedy: the wit and speed of the generators must attempt to match the speed and danger of the moment. Audiences are also much more forgiving of performers when their out-of-nowhere comic responses don't quite connect; in drama, we can be very unforgiving when improvising is less associated with realism of the moment than it is with shock values: Brando mumbling an obscenity about God is decidedly fraudulent. Despite of LAST TANGO IN PARIS being hailed as a masterstroke of improv, I think Bertolucci confirms that the only way drama, especially sexual drama, can be permitted free association is by the appearance of spontaneity that is in fact rehearsed and LAST TANGO IN PARIS is very. As movie makers, Mailer and John Cassavetes are experimental ruffians; Bertolucci has the controlling sensibilities of a real artist, even if he defrauds his own "breakthrough" subject matter.
A more luxuriantly decadent metropolis than Paris is inconceivable; the city vibrates with sensual willfulness without requisite guilt--it demands you liberate yourself and shrug off any need for penance. And Paris of fall and winter is especially invigorating and impulsive--its chill creates a buffer between you and all the encroachments of daily living and tourists. While Bertolucci and Storaro capture the wintry freedom of anonymity, viewers will end up preferring that they had used Paris more expressively--their idea of the city seems to be one too many metaphorical bridges to nowhere--and had refrained from the soft vaginal-toned colors because a dull glaze eventually seeps over our eyes. Helping the sex-loaded ambiance immensely is Gato Barbieri's music--the surprisingly libidinous, anticipatory romanticism of the violins and piano co-mingling with the horny, jazzy sax; it's so swooningly concupiscent that it lifts you to levels the movie only promises to get at.
Some twenty three years after the fact, it can be posited that Kael and Mailer produced false births--Bertolucci having pulled his diapers over their privates, about which both writers believe they impart intellectual substance. How Bertolucci must still be laughing at their whipped up verbosity and supposed candidness, although he can't discount the effects of their orgasms on the box office, or refrain from using Kael's in ads and as accompanying text to the movie's laser disc packages. In Kael's N.Y. Times excoriation of Mailer's MARILYN, and partly a response to Mailer's piece on LAST TANGO IN PARIS, which was partly a response to her review of the movie, she wrote: Mailer is "cut off from respectability, like our country; the greatest American writer is a bum, and a bum who's starting not to mind it. The time to begin worrying is when both he and the United States start finding virtues in this condition; we could all end up like drunks doing a music-hall turn." Re-reading their reviews of LAST TANGO IN PARIS, that's close to how we end up feeling about the both of them: these two overcompensating pugilists have been going at each other for so long that it's we readers who feel punch drunk--reeling from the absence of the perceptive simplicities and confidences they somehow failed to slug each other with. But real autobiography has never been Kael's strong suit and Mailer's public contretemps and betrayals are blamed on the bottle. Our most provocative cultural arbiters didn't deliver the goods: LAST TANGO IN PARIS is still a dance of death between two men.
-- RalfBenner@aol.com
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