Rating: 
Summary: Brando's Best
Review: If there is anyone out there that wonders why Marlon Brando has
been called the greatest film actor of all time, one need only to
see this film to get their answer. Although it is somewhat dated and certainly not for everyone, Last Tango in Paris is a true
masterpiece of filmmaking.
Tame by today's standards, it is easy to see why 1972 audiences were shocked by its brutal frankness and full frontal nudity. It is a film about isolation, betrayal and confronting
one's own insecurities.
I found the beginning most difficult to believe- middle aged man begins an affair with a beautiful young woman after having met
her only moments before in an empty apartment. And then they
continue to meet for sex even though he insists that they reveal
nothing about themselves beyond the physical act of sex!
Once past this impossible beginning, we begin to learn more about
the characters- he is a lonely widower, she is engaged to a young
film student. She eventually accepts the fact that their relationship is nothing more than sexual.
Maria Schneider is very good in her role as the French girl and she seems completely comfortable with the graphic nude scenes she is in. But it is Brando who commands our complete attention. He dominates every scene and while Schneider spends a great deal of time being naked, he does not yet it is still his character that facinates us.
The film gets bogged down in some areas and many viewers may become bored with the scenes that involve some of the supporting characters. But, and trust me on this, DO NOT miss the scene in
which Brando visits the body of his dead wife. It is not a long scene but it alone is worth the price one will pay for seeing this film- be it in cash and/or time. It is a scene that all students of film and acting should be required to see. Once you have seen it I am sure you will agree- acting does not get any better than this.
Rating: 
Summary: Gives a wry smile.
Review: Brando's performance in this film is full of vim and vigour, always bordering on the comic, especially in the scene with his dead wife. Bertolucci had begun psychoanalysis just a couple of years before and his penchant to indulge Brando seems to be a direct result of this. In retrospect much of the film's theme could be interpreted as misogynistic, there's certainly a lot of female fear aroused as a direct result of male aggression whether by Brando or Schneider's boyfriend. In fact 30 years down the line Maria Schneider has disowned this film, citing it as 'exploitative'. Nevertheless the film was considered quite bold for its time, even if what makes audiences uncomfortable about this film now is not quite the same as what made them uncomfortable 30 years ago. After feminism, Aids and the 60's backlash that was the '80's, 'Last Tango In Paris' looks shockingly naive in its view of sexual relationships. I think a lot of women today would find the Schneider character slightly embaressing in her vapid earnestness. You have to give it to Brando though, he does get a digit probing by Maria Schneider, now thats true dedication to his craft! I can't imagine a Grade A Hollywood actor of today such as Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks engaging in such thespian devotion, too much of a 'masculine' image to maintain. Which just goes to show how little risk mainstream Hollywood actors are prepared to indulge in nowadays compared to just a generation ago.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated
Review: Marlon Brando is a marvelous actor, but PLEASE someone ELSE write his dialogue! On how many different occasions in one film do we need to hear about pigs? I have never understood why this movie is lauded so much, so I decided to give it another chance. The dialogue is simply absurd. Who talks like this? The relationship between Brando and the young French girl is very S&M, but in my opinion, these themes were explored better and more attractively in "9 1/2 Weeks". If you're looking for nudity and graphic sex, you won't find that here either. The sex scenes are few and far between, and when they do occur your reaction will most likely be "OH! MY EYES!!" A film without a writer is a recipe for disaster, and it really shows here. Skip this. You're not missing a thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Donnez moi du buerre!
Review: I remember watching this movie when I was a teenager. I think I got about 3 minutes into it before I "lost interest" and went to sleep. So I felt it was only fair to go back and watch the whole thing after seeing "The Dreamers", and feeling that now I'm old enough to appreciate it. LTIP, beyond the butter and the anonymous sex, truly is a messed up movie. Brando's dialogue is terribly stilted and cheesy, but the performance he turns in at his dead wife's bedside is shocking and moving beyond belief. The movie is as much a condemnation of the promiscuous society as it is a celebration, and the final ten minutes are harrowing and heart-breaking. The movie suffers from 70's pacing though, where too much of the "action" is saved for the denouement, and all the meticulously crafted scenes before that suffer for the sake of a brutal finale. I also found the finale a tad unnecessarily moralistic - bad things happen to bad people...
But Paris is beautiful, the movie is at once both intelligent and though provoking and nowadays seems less pornographic or provocative that an Britney Spears concert, although far, far more worthy of your time.
Rating:
Summary: The genius of Marlon Brando
Review: I remember seeing this movie for the first time about a billion yrs ago and thinking, 'So THIS is what being a superb actor is all about.' Brando, playing an expat in Paris who is in despair over his wife's very recent suicide, never once seems to be acting, never seems aware of camera or audience, never seems to consider how others will view him or his role or this movie. Unbelievable.
The film was shocking when it was first made in 1973, especially for the graphic and (at that time) 'unusual' sexual scenes - and it still makes viewers squirm a bit, but his odd and almost voiceless relationship with Maria Schneider is not self-serving on either end. It's dispassionate and anonymous sex, meant as a Band-Aid on a wound too painful to be dealt with in any other way.
Super, super, super.
Rating:
Summary: Raw Models, Ruin and Misery.
Review: To begin with, Last Tango in Paris is a landmark in film history, it's Bertolucci's most psychological film, and a breakthrough conventional censorship, banned for almost ten years, Last Tango is brooding and sensual, raw and miserable, Maria Schneider appears here so voluptuous and everlasting, can't blame Brando's character (Paul), to become mad, she is both a child and a woman, a combination no one can resist (your sex doesn't matter), the ultimate object of sexual Catharsis, becoming wrath. This is a chamber piece, a conceptual story in the minds of its two protagonist, enters Marlon Brando; Paul's construction couldn't be more close to Brando's psychological truth, it is his most alike character, and Brando just exudes all of his unlimited potential, skills, and mastery of the acting art, delivering one of the most perfect performances in all movie history, a must for every student of acting and for any aspiring director in much concern of his or hers actor's performance. Complex, incomprehensible, silent in sorrow and in much pain, but completely lost in a duel because of his dead wife, this is Paul, egoist, manipulative, the world moves because of him, even at his lowest hour of pathetic self indulgent anal ways, Paul is everything inside the Apartment, and nothing outside of it. Enters Maria Schneider; Jeanne a French beauty (just in her early twenties), cast in a child like role with the sweetness and seduction of a Lolita, only this time is both voluptuous and dependent of a real man's love, Schneider is just unforgettable in this seductive character, and her performance is first class, a woman of its time: unbreakable, untouchable, daggling in distress, from there to discipline, all the complicated self-destructive bound, because she's nothing, an object of animation, a subjective mannequin, beaten into submission, raping again and again.
The apartment is the metaphor to their relation, un-scout even approaching the movie's end, it stands in much need of human candor, but the human condition won't let this happen, and Paul and his beauty will be forced to crash against one another, it's pure ruin and misery, and Bertolucci cages this and much more that doesn't meets the eye, with that masterful direction that only exist in the very best. Alas, it resembles the relation of a father with his daughter, with that daddy's care for her, and her Oedipus lust that can't be ignore, but doomed to die, shackled Paul's princess, Jeanne is here to carry with the burden of a long gone will to just be in comfort when the moment of excitement, that's why they don't need names inside the apartment; Frantic or Therapeutic?
The photography is achieved with smooth and cold colors that only the erotic European films possessed in the 70's and 80's, Vittorio Sttoraro gives and unforgettable atmosphere to the story, he knew it by heard, and so Bertolucci, you will always remember the Tango Dance Contest Mad Scene, it is the very essential way of photography, direction, and real acting, all in one, based in a perfect and sensible raw script. The beautiful and haunting music score, adds more atmosphere and strength to the already powerful images.
The DVD edition comes with an excellent transferring of the film, surely it looks as good as the day it was released, but the lack of additional material makes you want to know more about this mythical movie (the edition comes with a very illustrative eight page booklet, with inside information about the film's history, but a full length documentary would have give a much entertaining and depth view of the film), again the transferring is a fine work of good visuals and sounds, and the best of all, it is the uncut and uncensored version, as Bertolucci originally intended to be shown in Theaters back in the middle 70's, when everything was still uptight for such a film, there was no problem at all with the nude scenes, the problem was about the moral violence that the picture depicted in a way that no one had dare before to showed in the big screen, from there it came its heavily censorship, the psychological alternation of the most devastating loneliness and the filth and stink of the Human Insight Tremors, shown here with the intention to shock, not to move. Controversial still.
Rating:
Summary: nasty and shocking even 30 years later
Review: Maria Schneider has a nice little bush as shown in the bathroom scene with Marlon.I also like the scene when Marlon asks Maria to cut her nails and then put her fingers up his rear end.
Rating:
Summary: Among the greatest performances in the history of cinema
Review: Movie critics, both professional and otherwise, use the term "greatness" far too often. The term is so extreme that it should be reserved for movies that make us forget that we are in a theatre, or in our living room. This movie, if nothing else, makes us forget that we are movie-goers and makes us believe we are witnesses to human emotions.
"Last Tango in Paris" shows not only the talent of Bertolucci as a director, but also it allows Brando to fully express his emotional range, as perhaps the greatest screen actor of all time.
The movie exists almost as a set of inter-related scenes; each one stands on its own merit and style. The scenes do not, however, ever fall beneath the status of genius. They merely do not settle under one blanket description; the scenes occupy so many titles: love story, sucicidal, remorse, nostalgic, existential.
The story of the movie is well known by nearly everyone acquaitned with cinema: two people, a recently widowed American and a young, engaged French girl, meet by chance in an apartment and begin a purely carnal relationship. However, the actual movie delivers on so many more levels.
Brando's scenes which deal with his wofe and/or past are the best performances I have ever seen. The true emotion of an actor is visible, perhaps in their purest form ever on screen. Brando is not acting; he is living the role of one who is left and confused by love. His acting in the movie seems a bit unsure, which relates the contrasting emotions of Paul, his character.
Above all other scenes in this movie, Brando's encounter with the body of his dead wife is a testament to his ability to transcend his role as an actor. The screen seems to almost dissappear, and we are left with Brando and his dead wife, not an actor and an actress. This scene makes me feel, it causes emotions to rise from my heart. This is the ability of a truly great film.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent film, despite reviewers who cannot spell.
Review: Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) There are as many opinions as to Brando's greatest performance as there are Marlon Brando movies. Last Tango in Paris is my pick. Brando and the almost unforgivably beautiful Maria Schneider (also the first choice to play the lead in Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire) scorch the screen in this amazing film. Oddly, for the first fifteen minutes, I thought I was going to hate it. Jeanne (Schneider) is looking for an apartment. Very, very slowly. She encounters Paul (Brando) in one of them, and the two begin a torrid affair for no real reason we can discern (she is engaged but lonely; his wife recently committed suicide). He ends up taking the apartment, and the two continue their affair over the following days before Paul's wife's funeral, while Jeanne's fiance shoots a documentary film about her. Aside from the overly leisurely opening, Bertolucci mixes in the details of the two lives with their affair masterfully. The dynamics of their relationship, of course, change based on what's going on around them, and the whole thing meshes into an almost-perfect look at the dynamics of passion. The icing on the cake is Brando's monologue to his dead wife close to the end of the film; this is the scene that tabbed Brando for an Oscar nomination and won him a number of more minor awards for the film; it should also be noted that this remains the final X-Rated film to receive Oscar nominations, and was the only film rated NC-17 to have received them until Requiem for a Dream. People just don't make X-rated films like they used to! Frank, tempestuous, utterly brilliant. See it. **** ½
Rating:
Summary: The most shocking flm from the seventies
Review: This movie like no one before hits in the midle of the soul, no matter how old you are. If you're a teenager (like me in 1973 I was 18) it became a shocking experience, but through the years, this film witha remarkable trio (Moravia, Bertolucci and Brando) altogether inscrbed their names and melt the real essence of the existencialism (beyond the stranger from Camus) , exposes with no estetic considerations the nakeness of the human being. Loneliness , hopeless, desesperation, two persons existing before living each one to their own way, sharing an apartment where they can be true for a while. And surrounded by a silence`s veil. The story is told by a shy camera, who spies like a peeping tom, all the corners of the room.
And that finale in the dancerroom is an antology. The huge scream of pain couldn`t be told in a more dramatic style. The tango that certainly represents the hopeless and the blooded memory of that tha could have been and wasn`t, and the contrast with the nuance and touch of class that Paris means top us, it can be too heavy and awful for many viewers. But if you are able to go beyond these estetic obstacles and exploring the deep of the soul . You`ll be rewarded forever. A landmark in the story of the cinema. Brando will never reach that peak like this performance.
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