"Last Tango in Paris" - Film Review

Last Tango in Paris was considered shocking upon its release for how provocative its sex scenes are (including a now infamous one involving a stick of butter). But what those who upheld the film at the time saw and what still remains to be true of the film is how it uses these eroticized elements to neither turn us on nor disgust us but to tell a highly intriguing story of two disaffected people.

Two nameless individuals meet to fuck and fuck and fuck in spare apartment. He’s (Marlon Brando) a 45-year old American living in Paris. His wife committed suicide and he’s at a loss of what to do with his life. She’s (Maria Schneider) an attractive 20 year-old Parisian and engaged to be married to a lame filmmaker she doesn’t love. As their passionate inexplicable love affair goes on they explore their sexual appetites to increasingly destructive ends. Neither can seem to escape it though; they say that the outside world has no place inside the apartment when they’re together, but they’re increasingly drawn to eachother. 

The film is surprisingly subdued for a film with such overtly sexual content. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro  glazed the film with an orange tint that’s sleepy and dreamlike. 

Last Tango in Paris is a flawed film; its parts are much greater than its whole. It’s an occasionally (sometimes unintentionally so) funny, deeply dark, twisted descent into the minds of its two protagonists. The scenes between the two of them are the most interesting parts of the film and much of the rest of the film seems beside the point. Writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci gives the narrative a grandeur (in the arthouse vein and typical of Bertolucci’s style) that doesn’t always fit with the low-keyness of the story. However, Schneider and Brando give some great performances and the erotic content is as striking as it was upon its release.       

Grade: B