Last Tango in Paris

Rating:
Summary: Twisted and boring
Review: The characters motivations are disgusting and the acting is poor. I decided to watch this film since its supposed to be a cult classic and everyone talks about how Brando did such a find job.
Call me crazy but when watching a film I like to at least like one of the characters. Here I felt like I was at a party with a bunch of people I didn't like but couldn't leave. Talk about No Exit.
I guess some of you will like this film but unless you're one of those bleeding heart, artsy farsty people I suggest you save yourself the pain of trying to watch this film.

Rating:
Summary: A real experience that only works once.
Review: In 'Last Tango In Paris', Marlon Brando gives a performance that renders superlatives and previous notions about acting redundant. In fact, replace the bland phrase 'gives a performance' with 'gropes' or 'bleeds'. The film is at its best when content to simply follow Brando, his silent screams of anguish, his profane riffing, his bizarre improvisations, his anecdotal rambles and jazzy clowning, his desire and despair, his laughter and violence. The most celebrated example of this is in a one-sided dialogue with his dead wife, quite but brutal sneers and obscenities collapsing into a terrifying grief, lonelines, incomprehension, need, loss. The not uncomic juxtaposition of this emotional torrent, and its insentient, beflowered, mummified recipient adds a grotesqueness that only underlines the scene's power. The film's brilliant coda, like a 70s cop show directed by de Sade, in which bathos and pathos are indistinguishable, is driven by Brando's reckless bravura (that English accent!) and inspired control. Laugh? Cry? I nearly shot myself.

A first viewing of 'Last Tango' can be one of the most gruelling and shattering experiences in the cinema, and one can completely understand why Pauline Kael flipped for it. But this first viewing operates on an obscurantist level that scrapes the senses and emotions, but bypasses the mind. You get caught up in everything that colours Brando's soulbaring - the grimy Francis Bacon aesthetic, with its ugly, predominantly brown monochrome mise-en-scene; the murky, claustrophobic interiors; the dismally ironic splashes of colour in blood red; the circus-ring arena in which the sexual affair between Paul, an American exile whose rich wife has just killed herself, and the young bourgeois Jeanne, daughter of a late, high-ranking military-officer, is played out, complete with poses, props, colours and creases from Bacon paintings that are supposed to express internal traumas. The title dance and the initial set-up - widower tries to find escape in anonymous sex - inextricably links sex and death, and determines a compositional style contesting absence and presence, darkness and light; as well as the atmosphere of sterility, depletion, disintegration and decadence that hangs over the film like a fashionable painting.

Subsequent viewings reveal how far the director betrays his star. It's as if there are two movies - the psychodrama Brando is intuitively feeling out, shot in tight, inescapable, long-take close-ups; and an arty intellectual exercise that flaunts its own technique and theoretical interests - the obsession with mirrors, reflections and shards to fragment the body; the doubling of characters; the psychological framework; the Godardian use of slushy music and composition as alienation effects; the sub-plot tripe involving Jeanne and her film-maker fiancee, with all its ideas about 'representation', 'the body', 'subjectivity' blah blah; the Marxist infusion of class and race etc. This intellectual guff is like a prison from which Brando's flayed spirit tries to escape, just as the decor (more enterprisingly) is forever blocking characters from each other. The tension makes for a fascinating movie - although the misogynistic scene in which a gummy granny putting her false teeth watched by the ripe young mini-skirted Jeanne, whose body the camera eyes up and down, unfortunately sets the tone - but for Bertolucci, the irreversible rot starts here.

Rating:
Summary: "Exorcisms........"
Review: In that rarely seen Jules Dassin gem "A Dream of Passion" Melina Mercouri refers to this semi-autobiographical [is it?] movie about Brando's "Walpurgisdae' with Schneider. She does have the more difficult role - being naked most of the time, and depending where you first saw it, bits and pieces fell to the censors. This is a 'complete' version of the original.

PARIS has never looked been seedier - except possibly for Polanski's "The Tenant", but that's through another lens, and there's also the now infamous side-streets and vacancies of "Pola X".

Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" REMAINS daring today, the premise? Yet another man, trying to make sense of his wife's unexplained suicide, embarks on an increasingly brutal sexual odyssey with a willing girl half his age. [Who knows? Rumor had it back then that the role was originally conceived with a young man in mind.] This 'journey' is an attempt to keep himself alive and grounded - somewhat along the lines of Poe's comment about drug/alcohol abuse "I drink and take opium to remain sane".

Quite a harrowing journey including the infamous 'butter-scene' and still a must for the serious film student. Others have tried, Bogarde "The Night Porter" also quite sensational; "Blue" with Binoche has a 'touch' of this experience too.

Brando is fortunately still very much with us; Schneider went on to make "The Passenger" with Jack Nicholson .............

Rating:
Summary: Misogynist drivel
Review: The plot of the film is simple. The Marlon Brando Character is depressed over the death of his wife. He gives a performance of grief at the grave side. He goes to rent and apartment and meets the Maria Schneider character. He rapes the Maria Schneider character, but that okay, cause you know that women really like that sort of stuff.

Maria and Marlon agree to meet, just for sex, no names at the apartment. Is this maybe Loehengrin and not a Bertolucci film?

Of course this makes tremendous sense. Marlon is middle aged and not to attractive. Maria is 20 something and drop dead gorgeous. Marlon also comes across as a self pitying dope who cannot string two words together. In another scene he violently sodomizes Schiender. The plot of this film could only exist as a fantasy of a middle aged man.

The climax of the film (an expression one hesitates to use for a range of reasons) is when the Brando character falls in love and wants to continue the relationship. Schnieder rejects him rather forcefully end of film.

The film has sparse dialogue, Marlon looks dreadful overacts continually and one wonders how anyone took it seriously. Probably because it came out prior to the women’s movement. It is hard to think of a contemporary director who would produce such a unrealistic portrayal of a female character.

Rating:
Summary: Brando and Bertolucci
Review: Paris is dirty, or at least the parts of it visited by Bertolucci's camera. The beginning of the film follows the separate paths of the two main actors(Brando, Schneider) through the streets of Paris. We've yet to meet them or learn anything about them but we can't wait til they finally do cross paths in an old run down apartment where most of the movie will take place. The cinematic style is unmistakably European and at a time when European cinema was at its very highest point. For a short time in the late sixties and early seventies film was considered on almost equal footing with literature. In fact the cinema seemed to be the perfect medium to transmit what the novel had become...experimental, non-linear, post-structural. If culture was entering into a post-verbal phase cinema seemed the obvious medium for high culture to express itself in. Antonioni's Blow-Up(based on the Cortazar story) and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris are the most convincing examples of cinema having achieved this equal footing with literature. It didn't last long but for a few years foreign cinema produced one masterpiece after another. European cinema was at its height in 1972 and so was Marlon Brando. Bertolucci was a new director and Brando already a star but it never seems either is interfering with the others talents. They encourage and compliment each other perfectly. Brando is allowed to improvise all he wants it appears but Bertolucci is free to turn the sound down or up, or move the camera closer or further away to get just the effect he wants. They both come out looking great. It is as powerful an acting performance as exists anywhere(no other movie feels as real as this one), and it is a very pleasingly constructed piece of modern cinema. Two virtuosos practicing their craft.
The story is a depressing one but its the moments when Brando departs from the script that one feels the freedom that a live performance when everything is really clicking and happening can give one. And its the perfect script for allowing such moments of departures because the character in the story needs desperately to feel free or liberated again from the confines of what life/culture has become. In their rented room Brando and Scheider explore a reality of their own making. Their room becomes a playground where no stultifying bourgeois rules exist. Ultimately the game does not shut out real life and that is the tragedy of the Brando character. As real life creeps in to their play world the game winds down and appropriately the final scenes show the characters not in their room but in public, once again in the streets where the film began. The younger Schneider just sought a momentary diversion in the affair whereas the older Brando relied on it for his very sustenance and once the game ends there is nothing else for him. Without a playmate to keep him playful he is simply desperate. Everything about this film is perfect, including the music. A long film at 128 minutes but one that impresses you again every time you see it. No other movie has the power this one has. Brando's most interesting character, and Bertolucci's most interesting/accomplished piece of film.

Rating:
Summary: brando is great, but this movie aint.
Review: sorry, i just don't get it????? slow going nowhere?? flop...

Rating:
Summary: One Of My Personel Favorit Films
Review: Last Tango In Paris is one of the best films of all time. This film pulls you in and never lets go the film is just so hunting. I can never forget the tango sequence towards the end of the film so hunting and the photography is just brillent one of the greatest photographed films of all time. Banardo Bertoluccie is just brillent one of the greatest directors of all time he has made some of the greatest films ever made he is just amazing. Watch it you will love it. But this film is for adults only and is rated NC-17 so this is not a film for the kids.

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Rating:
Summary: So much potential, so little payoff
Review: "Last Tango in Paris" is a curious mixture of brilliance and tedium. Brando's acting is finely honed, and the direction and cinematography are striking and atmospheric. The best parts of the film -- several of the scenes between the lovers, and Brando's monologue to his dead wife -- are darkly haunting.

The problem, however, is that the memorable scenes are separated by long stretches of stupendous boredom. The entire subplot with Jean-Pierre Leaud is weak and annoying, and much of the dialogue throughout the movie is atrocious -- the sort of rambling dreck that one might expect from a college student trying to sound "deep." It's as if the film's editor was incapable of distinguishing real emotion from sophomoric posturing and simply left everything in the final print.

Rent before buying if at all possible. Reactions to this film will vary wildly.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting movie for adults
Review: This was an interesting movie with good actors and an explicit plot.It is worth seeing for Marlon Brando's great performance.This was a good movie for people that are into trashy romance.However,it isn't for all audiences but it is a compelling and fascinating film for adults.Very powerfull .

Rating:
Summary: Could have been a contender
Review: I agree with the central theme of "Last Tango" and enjoyed some of the acting but overall I felt it was a very weak film and certainly not what I would expect from great masters such as Bertolucci and Brando.

The film is about an American man named Paul (Brando) who cannot come to terms with his wife's suicide. He has a debauched and somewhat sadistic affair with a woman named Jeanne (Maria Schneider) whom he meets in an empty apartment. The lovers agree to meet each other as long as they adhere to Paul's insistence that they not reveal anything about each other's identity including their names and personal histories. They continue their torrid love affair for an unspecified period of time with several notable episodes. At one point with the assistance of some globs of butter, Paul pokes Jeanne in the posterior while making her recite some church liturgy. But in a moment of fair play, he subsequently insists that she clip her nails and provide him with a dual-digit rectal probe. All of this was scandalous in the early seventies but barely raises an eyebrow today, which is probably one reason why a lot of reviewers can't understand all the hype about the film's daring, revolutionary nature. Eventually Paul comes to terms with his wife's suicide and decides to pursue a conventional relationship with Jeanne. But as Jeanne correctly surmises, the two of them can only coexist under the conditions of anonymity that previously governed their relationship.

Thematically, I am in complete agreement with the film. A relationship with emotional and sexual honesty can only take place in an environment that is free of obligations, identities and personal histories. But such a relationship is bound to be short lived. This theme was explored with much greater artistic depth and insight in "Hiroshima Mon Amour".

The acting left much to be desired. Brando being Brando has a few wonderful moments but generally comes across as grisly, semi-articulate slab of meat. This film could have been truly great if Bertolucci had paid attention to structure and dialogue and developed the story more around the anonymous sexual relationship. Instead, he simply threw the film's components together and declared it to be dangerous. Too bad.