Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris," a French–Italian movie that premiered across the United States on this day in 1973, caused quite a stir — such a stir that Premiere Magazine included it in its "100 Movies That Shook the World" list.
It received an X rating, which has come to be associated with pornography but was initially given to legitimate feature films (1969's "Midnight Cowboy," for example) that had content deemed too extreme for children. That applied not only to sexual content but to violent content as well.
Film critic Roger Ebert gushed about "Last Tango in Paris" after its New York premiere in late 1972: It was "one of the great emotional experiences of our time," he wrote. "It's a movie that exists so resolutely on the level of emotion, indeed, that possibly only Marlon Brando, of all living actors, could have played its lead. Who else can act so brutally and imply such vulnerability and need?"
"There is a lot of sex in this film," Ebert wrote, "more, probably, than in any other legitimate feature film ever made — but the sex isn't the point, it's only the medium of exchange."
Brando's character, a middle–aged American widower living in Paris, certainly had needs. And Ebert was right about his vulnerability. When the movie began, Brando's wife was already dead, a suicide victim, so the viewers never saw anything of the marriage other than what was said about it on the screen, and the reason for the suicide was never revealed so the viewers never really knew why she did it. Still there were some ominous clues scattered about the story.
That isn't the best way to judge a marriage, obviously, but the union clearly left a lot to be desired — and the vulnerability of Brando's character had deep roots in that. That was clear when Brando ranted while standing at his wife's coffin at her wake.
Brando's character had been abused, and it had been a lifelong story of abuse. It started with his alcoholic parents, and it continued from there into a marriage that was abusive, if not physically then certainly emotionally.
The role had its flaws, but I thought the character suffered from arrested development from his youth that carried into his adult years. That was why Ebert observed that Brando's character was "a man whose whole existence has been reduced to a cry for help — and who has been so damaged by life that he can only express that cry in acts of crude sexuality."
The nudity and the sexuality amounted to no more than stage props for the story. "Last Tango in Paris" wasn't about those things.
Well, let me amend that.
It was about sex in the sense that some people use sex as a haven and a weapon, not as an expression of love for another person, and the lovers in "Last Tango in Paris" were like that.
The relationship between Brando and a young French woman (Maria Schneider), though, was mostly physical. At Brando's character's insistence, they knew nothing of each other, not even each other's names. But that didn't mean they didn't use sex as a haven and a weapon as well, even as a physical release — but never as an expression of genuine affection.
I have heard people call it Brando's greatest performance, and I have my issues with that. It was a nuanced performance, I will concede that, but I am far more likely to align myself with Ebert, who wrote that he didn't know if it was Brando's greatest performance, but the movie "certainly contains his most emotionally overwhelming scene" — his rant next to his wife's coffin. Ebert wrote that Brando delivered "one of the most moving speeches of love I can imagine."
In that scene, Ebert wrote, Brando "makes it absolutely clear why he is the best film actor of all time. He may be a bore, he may be a creep, he may act childish about the Academy Awards — but there is no one else who could have played that scene flat–out, no holds barred, the way he did, and make it work triumphantly."
Brando was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Actor (which he lost to Jack Lemmon). Bertolucci was nominated for Best Director (and lost to George Roy Hill).
Schneider, who later said she felt raped by the experience, received no Oscar consideration.
