(Crosspost: https://larryhongblog.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/burying-bertoluccis-last-tango/)
To rewatch Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is to revisit the tremendous displeasures that came with watching the film five or six years ago. If I – a cisgender male – can experience so much pain and suffering from this film, I cannot even begin to imagine what a victim of sexual assault would feel. But I am convinced that rewatching the film in the context of #MeToo is a necessary exercise. If there is anything that the #Metoo movement has taught us, it is that sexual revolutions can be as reactionary as they can be liberating, as much an impediment as an engine to gender equality and women’s liberation. Sex (whether we are talking about the act of coitus itself, or the broader surround of that activity) is never divorced from the politics of desire and ownership, as Kate Millett so powerfully reminds us in her Sexual Politics, and Bertolucci’s own The Dreamers shows decades later. Bertolucci’s Last Tango, seen in this light, is a thoroughly irredeemable film. It creates a reactionary and masochistic desiring machine that is nothing other than the product of director Bertolucci and actor Marlon Brando’s own phallic imagination. Meanwhile, esteemed critics of the day such as Pauline Kael, who is most famous in Europe for being a critic of the “decadent” turn in European cinema, first raised this shallow movie onto the level of art film, and then place it on a pedestal. In doing so, these critics are committing the same violence as what we as a society have done to the perpetrators of sexual violence throughout history: ignoring, normalizing, or worse idolizing, their violence, as if their aggression releases some “moral truths” that the rest of us are not privy to.
For all the sexual revolution this film promises, it is startling, as critic Stephen Farber reminds us, that the sex in this film is so utterly disappointing, if not downright boring. All the sex positions and maneuvers in the film we have seen before, and they fail to instruct for their lack of beauty or originality. Even the two rape scenes in this film are boring (if it is not so inanely distasteful), compared to say, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, whose depiction of rape is so disturbing and morally charged both for its explicit brutality and eroticism, or Mike Leigh’s Naked, where one can’t help but walk away with a feeling of staring down an abyss. The sex scenes in Last Tango are inane, because they exist solely in service to the man’s quest for some sort of elementary “truths” about sex – in Kael’s words, “sex without phoniness,” or to put it more concretely, sex that is free from “bourgeois” trappings of love, intersubjectivity, and mutual dependence. The inaneness pervades the rape scenes as well, because they service the same goal of expressing and affirming these “truths.” At its core, these sexual truths merely disguise the language of domination and power imbalance that lay at the foundation of all sexual relationships.
Last Tango, is in short, a story told from a man’s perspective. It is the story of a man’s need to be isolated from the rest of the world. A man’s need to process his traumas after the loss of his loved one. A man’s demand that their sexual experimentations remain anonymous (the modern-day parallel to this would be “girlfriend experience” offered by high-class escort agencies). We are told that the girl accepts the rules of the game set by the man without much thinking. That while she might not welcome the original encounter (Roger Ebert: rape is too strong a word!) with an open arm, she is not opposed to it either, or at least acquiesces in the arrangement ex poste. That as a young girl in Paris faced with both a shallow fiancé and a demanding mother, she sees the arrangement as a welcome refuge from the reality of the world. That she simply couldn’t resist his extraordinary sexual prowess (which invariably lasts less than one minute). That hell, by the end of it all, she’s ready to eat his vomit as a “preuve de l’amour.”
For what’s worth, we do see glimpses of her incomplete rebellion. For example, after she returns once again to his apartment (for their encounters consist of a series of unannounced stops by her in his apartment), finding him sitting on the floor eating fromage, she is commanded to bring him butter. She complies before protesting, in English first (their official language of communication) “You made me crazy that you are so damn sure that I’d come back here,” and then shifting back into her native language “Parce que tu crois, toi, qu’un américain, assis par terre dans un appartement vide, à manger du fromage et à bois de l’eau, tu crois que c’est intéressant?” He nods, of course, and Marlon Brando and his fans nod with him. It is as if he is saying: who is she, a 19-year-old nobody actress, to question the great Marlon Brando for being uninteresting. Even the long boring monologue by Brando about his childhood in the farm (product of improvisation) has been endlessly parsed by Brando’s adoring fans, who perceive every bit of his words as prophetic wisdom. After all, we live in a society where powerful men have the status of kings. But even her incomplete rebellion is immediately quelled. First her authority to even question him is stripped away (by a nod alone, too), and then quickly her body, followed by her soul. In what we now know to be rape both on-screen and off-screen, he reestablishes his absolute authority over her.
The affairs continues, of course, until one day he moves out of the apartment. When they next meet each other, it is again below the famous Pont de Bir-Hakeim, where they saw each other for the first time. Only he no longer passively trails behind her but comes up to greet her, cheerfully. She tells him, firmly this time, that it’s all over; he insists that this is merely the beginning of something new, as if nothing has happened between their two encounters under the bridge. He volunteers to tell us about himself this time: his age (45), his status (widower), where he lives (hotel that is kind of a dump). Charming and all. Ready to mesmerize his current fans and win over new ones. They have had a wonderful sexual experiment, but he is now convinced that after all sex is not possible without love, but it is all too little, too late. Meanwhile, up until the end, we are kept in the dark about the interiority of the girl: what attracted her to the man and why was the attraction lost? These questions are never meant to be seriously answered because neither the girl nor the actress Maria Schneider is never meant to be taken seriously.
I return again to the question of the representation of sex, and its potential for driving progressive changes. Certainly as children of the 21st century, which has seen both a proliferation of sex on screen and a flattening of gap between the “art porns” and the “art films” of directors such as Pedro Almodovar (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), Lars Von Trier (Nymphomaniac), and Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl), the sex in Last Tango no longer has any shock value, if it ever had when it was released in the 70s. But the same thing could not be said about several contemporaneous films that continue to shock us. Nagisa Oshima’s In The Realm of Senses is perhaps the most sexually explicit film short of porn ever made in history, even though this film is almost certainly not about sex, but power, and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, a wonderfully weird hodgepodge of drugs, sex, gangsters, and rock-n-roll, is, in the word of critic Stephen Farber, “the most important, revolutionary movie about sex that I know.” These films enriched and informed our understanding of sex and sexuality, by crossing and recrossing the line between what is sexually permitted and not permitted. But perhaps we have reached a point where screening sex truly no longer has any shocking value (at least among the more progressive cinephiles among us), and perhaps progressive cinema about sex needs a new direction. One possible answer comes from Nicholas Roeg’s masterpiece Don’t Look Now, which contains one of the most beautiful sex scenes that I know, and crucially it is between “two people who know each other very well.” When is the last time you have seen a sex scene between a loving couple who make love (and not fuck, as France Ha would say) for the sole purpose of expressing their affection for each other?
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