Right Between the Legs

THERE ARE FOUR erotic scenes in The Last Tango in Paris which are so much more honest than the rest of the film that they should be excised, and exhibited by themselves as masterful short subjects. When Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider screw standing up, or shove each other up the ass with various appendages, or play with tenderness in a bathtub scene, director Bernardo Bertolucci's only intent is to evoke passion, harsh, hot or loving --and his intention is fulfilled.

Now, achieving authentic eroticism in such an embarassingly direct art as film is nothing to be sniffed at. And at a time when most enlightened filmmakers expend their energies on explicit violence, Bertolucci's attempt to explore the much more human warfare of sexuality is itself significant. The pre-opening reputation of The Last Tango, and the controversy which now surrounds it, should thus not be seen solely as the result of hucksterism.

BUT ASIDE from isolated scenes, the film is so dishonest and uninteresting that all the talk which builds it up as an unprecedented masterwork will probably leave you embittered -- especially if you shell out UA's asking-price at $4.50 a look. There is no story: the characters' lives are composed of sensationalistic incidents, and the motives for the way they live are never developed or explained. At film's beginning, Paul, the American expatriate, is just a ravaged romantic, and at the end he is a dead one. Jeanne, a babied product of the Parisian middle-class, is throughout nothing more than a volatile brat with a voluptuous body. As their sexual partnership, founded on a chance encounter in a vacant apartment, begins to turn to love, even the emotional tension becomes attenuated -- the only question, will the girl accept Paul's cynical attitudes towards sex and the world in general as well as his basically sentimental ones towards love and fidelity?

The entire situation gets ever more ridiculous. In a wicked, fence-straddling about-face, Bertolucci allows Paul to act obnoxious even while he visually supports Paul's view of things. Nothing holds any people in the film together except for the pursuit of private obsessions, and Bertolucci's Paris is nothing but a lush bourgeois playground. There's no way that a sensitive individual can survive unbruised and unbowed in such an environment, but there's no indication that Paul had any strength to his sensitivity even before he hit Paris, and when he talks of facing death (meaning the suicide of his wife) the self-pity drips off the screen.

And why should we accept at all the social background to all this? Bertolucci stylizes external conditions according to the moods of his characters, and leaves us no choice but to believe in or reject the entire world he creates. Unfortunately, his vision is so simple that we must completely surrender our own intelligence and sensitivity to see things the director's way. Right from the opening shot, a gliding dolly which bears down close on Brando as he lets out a cry of angst, Bertolucci tries to call forth a complete emotional identification which he doesn't earn then or later.

When the picture is interesting, it's because of Marlon Brando. He is good enough to make us feel emotions we really don't believe. As a 45-year-old man whose wife has committed bloody suicide (for reasons which are not at all explained), he is wrenching as he is torn between sorrow and bitterness, bawling at her corpse and berating her memory. As an experienced middle-aged stallion, he is amusing off-hand with either margarine or masochism, and as a man who had inherited a flophouse (which is also the residence of his dead wife's lover), he covers the broad range of an intelligent man's self-disgust.

But Brando cannot connect the different sides of him which his director has simply caught, not structured. Bertolucci is too busy using facile Freudianisms to account for Paul's aggression and Jeanne's passivity, or emphasizing yet another in a long chain of random perversities (like Mother's loves for Father's boots). He does throw in a welcome parody of Godard and his films, all hollow Hollywood-loving childishness, abetted by the eternally adolescent actor Jean-Pierre Leaud. But even its welcome is soon worn out. And the last tango itself is pathetic: painted Fellini faces contort, and toothpick bodies sway on a dance floor as Paul tries to impress Jeanne at ringside with foreign accents and booze, and after a few drunken moves on the dance floor, flashes a moon at an irate dance judge.

Still those sex scenes are beautiful. All Bertolucci needs is a tough producer and a good screenplay. And I think we should be charitable to the woman who helped make his inevitable commercial success possible -- Miss Pauline Kael. It's clear that the glittering combination of a favorite director and Marlon Brando overcame, in her eyes, the poor acting and pretentiousness (which Kael usually hits on). The film seems to have struck her where she often seems to think: right between her legs. The orgasmic New Yorker outpouring remains, alas, far more intriguing than what the filmmakers have spewed forth.