Last Tango in Paris (1972) - film review

Paul is a 45-year-old American who is coming to terms with his wife’s seemingly inexplicable suicide.  Jeanne is a 20-something Parisian who is engaged to Tom, an aspiring filmmaker who intends making her the star of his next film.  Both are looking for a place to live in Paris.  They meet in a decrepit top floor apartment and are instantly attracted towards one another.  As they embark on a sordid yet passionate love affair, Paul insists that he will reveal nothing about himself and he expects Jeanne to do the same.  What begins as a playful game soon turns into a dark obsession from which neither will escape...

One of the most controversial films of the 1970s, Last Tango in Paris still manages to shock with its full-on eroticism and darkly nihilistic portrayal of a sado-masochistic love affair involving a young woman and a man twenty years her senior.   Although it is now considered a groundbreaking psycho-sexual drama, a landmark of post-modern cinema, it was met with a storm of negative criticism. The film soon acquired a reputation as a piece of highbrow pornography, ensuring it would become a huge commercial success.  The film’s notoriety may even have helped boost the sales of certain dairy products as well.

Director Bernardo Bertolucci was no stranger to controversy and his uncompromising brand of cinema, which dealt primarily with radical sexual and political themes, made him one of the foremost Italian filmmakers of his generation.   Whilst Last Tango in Paris is too self-indulgent and too self-conscious to be regarded as Bertolucci ’s best film, it does provide a thoughtful reflection on notions of masculinity and male identity in a post-industrial, post-feminist era.  The sexual revolution that took place in the 1960s brought some measure of empowerment and freedom to women but left men confused and diminished.  What this film shows us is how the two sexes try to adjust to this brave new world, where the rule book of social and moral etiquette has been torn up and where individual self-fulfilment appears to be the only true reality.  It is a bleak angst-ridden world, where animal appetites are more easily sated but where real happiness is more elusive than ever.    

Marlon Brando tops his Oscar-winning turn in The Godfather (1972) with a performance which is even more compelling and revealing.  Without his solid presence, Last Tango in Paris could easily have ended up as a tacky piece of erotica, in the Emmanuelle vein – pretty but vacuous.  What Brando conveys is the sense of a middle-aged man who is profoundly tormented by the barrenness of his own existence, a man driven almost insane by his inability to understand either himself or the women he falls in love with.  Brando was an actor who was notoriously secretive about his own life and yet here he gives a performance that is so truthful and intense that it feels like a public confession, perhaps revealing more about who he was than any autobiography or interview.  It is fair to say that Last Tango in Paris is Marlon Brando’s last great piece of work, even if it is understandably overshadowed by the role that immediately preceded it.

© James Travers 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?