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LAST HANDJOBS IN PARIS Two of America’s most revered cultural arbiters during the 70s wrote the two most famous essays on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris: Pauline Kael’s “Tango,” reprinted in Reeling and For Keeps, and “Tango, Last Tango” by Norman Mailer, available in his collection entitled Pieces. Both filings are effusive and propped to be daring, and are justly famous for their pugnacity; they’re also fearlessly overwritten, racing to be illuminating while shedding no more than dim wattage, and contain some startling comments we wouldn’t be wrong in guessing the sages would privately regret having emphatically divined. Kael calls Last Tango the “most powerfully erotic” and “the most liberating” movie ever made. (In his autobio, Marlon Brando doubts the worthiness of such hype.) Of the two pieces, hers is the more consumable—though minus Mailer’s freedom to repeat the movie’s infamous obscenities as The New Yorker was still governed by William Shawn—and unquestionably the soakiest: you virtually see her climaxing on her yellow pad, her pencil substituting for Brando’s stick. The review might have been deliciously intimate had she included some of her own zipless encounters but, as we learn in Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, her sex life was negligible. The men she wanted dumped her for other men. Sometimes mired in the toxicity of convoluted sentences and belittling assertions of Kael as “our own Lady Vinegar” and (forty years before Kellow) “the first frigid of film critics,” Mailer’s critique contains the killer reaction as the core dissatisfaction with the movie, one she doesn’t acknowledge as shortcoming: “Yet as the film progresses with every skill in evidence, while Brando gives a performance that is unforgettable, as the historic buggeries and reamings are delivered, and the language breaks through barriers not even yet erected—no general of censorship could know the armies of obscenity were so near!—as these shocks multiply, and lust goes up the steps to love, something bizarre happens to the film. It fails to explode. It is a warehouse of dynamite and yet something goes wrong with the blow-up...One leaves the theater bewildered. A fuse was never ignited.” This is the Mailer of choice—really sticking it to the queen of hyperbolists. Then comes the typical macho Mailerism: he tells of his disappointment in the movie’s sex, that it isn’t real and it’s Brando minus the fully Monty. Mailer is preoccupied with adolescent desire to compare his with Brando’s and in his book Marlon explains why shrinkage prevented a coup d'oeil. Hardly the condition to produce inches of copy. In their frenzy to be as hip as the participates of the sexual revolution, Kael and Mailer avoid—either by design or rare involuntary nescience—what’s clearly observable: Brando’s Paul and Maria Schneider’s Jeanne are the improvised heterosexualization of quickie, nameless male-on-male sex. And not solely homosexuals: sex between otherwise presumably straight men is probably an accidental convergence of place, timing, situation and stimulation. Providing locale, opportunity and the sudden hots, Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider then wing it to deepen the consequences of the sleaze sessions and the damnedest “bizarre” thing does happen: in a journey to recover lifeforce, Paul finds love. But one-sided: Jeanne’s “playing grow up, while feeling like a child” as curiosity turns into risk and he’s oblivious to the “dynamite.” Schneider delivers a three word summation to Brando that’s as equal to him as it is to Paul: “You hate women.” She isn’t directly calling him a homosexual, only recognizing what he’s feeling in the vacant dump apartment—despairingly misogynistic: his wife a two-timing hag who commits suicide, his wife’s mother a religious fool, his wife’s friends whores (one looking like Barbara Jefford) and losers. From his gut Brando internalizes as angry failure: when Paul says not exactly to but of his wife’s lover, “I wonder what she ever saw in you,” it’s antagonism, disgust and self-recognition: his boxing, bongo-playing, slight stabs at journalism haven’t prevented him from becoming a kept loser in a flophouse. Reeking with combative malice, he’s on the run, thus his need for borderless coarseness, engendering a chance event of sex. A very close friend once remarked a “stiff cock has no conscience” and years later the truism remains durable: moralistic “nevers” aside, there’s no way we can ever be sure how we’ll respond when the seismic force of a spontaneous flush creates a bulge or douse. For Paul, the anonymous fucking and fingers up the ass are cathartic. For Jeanne, complexities emerge from the supposed no strings attached sex to overtake her. Notwithstanding her accelerating angst popping up in one of the movie’s better moments—in a subway with her fiance, she quarrels with him and they slap at each other, then fall into each other’s arms—she’s a Rubenseque Claudia Cardinale as nipper explorer of trash, equipped with easy-rip panties and, despite Paul’s prognostication of their future, screen-filling boobs already ready for the soccer field. Mailer’s macho gets it right: she “has nose appeal—you can smell her.” Brando writes in his book the role of Paul was emotionally draining, never wanting to go through a similar kind of pain again, and while we want to believe he means it, we ask this anyway—just how close to himself is his creation of degradation? Many of us read the gossip about his caprices with men, would eventually hear or read his confirmation, and sort of hoped he’d go for the dare. Detecting the resulting camouflage, director Ingmar Bergman objected, “As it is now, it makes no sense as a film. I don’t think it’s really about a middle-aged man and a young girl but about homosexuals. If you think about it in those terms, it becomes interesting.” I’d reiterate the movie isn’t about overt gays, it’s what’s left of Bertolucci’s fudged concept of two males without labels meeting in fortuity. This might explain Brando’s drainage: he’s invested so much heavyweight improv on top of a shaky foundation that his house of character collapses; he’s thinking too much. To his credit, the self-conscious churning on screen is exposure of the dissipation caused by the burden of real life regrets, some of them his explosive relationships with both sexes. Though Kael, in her drenched-panties rush to review the picture three months before its American release, incorrectly stated Bertolucci had conceived the role with Brando in mind, in fact the part was rethought when he agreed to play it after Jean-Louis Trintignant declined. Perhaps had to be altered: Brando previously dispatched what he was attracted to in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye and Trintignant faced his emotional affliction in Bertolucci’s The Conformist. In a 2001 interview, Schneider said that when receiving whatever latest revision of the script, her part was marked as an adolescent male. The director got away with the murky sexual undercurrents between Trintignant and the chauffeur; Brando, however, and probably the same with Trintignant, understood the guaranteed outrage to follow if agreeing to Paul sexually initiating a substantially younger male. Kael is right about Brando being photographed looking “ravaged, like the Francis Bacon painting under the film’s opening titles.” In what could be a cashmere overcoat worn early on, he’s seedily older than his character’s 45 years. (The second Francis Bacon painting used during the credits is much more intriguing: the figure sitting on a wooden chair, with arms and legs crossed, looks to be the inspiration for the caricature drawn of Kael for the 8/14/80 N.Y. Review of Books demolition job done on her by Renata Adler.) Yet when Jeanne calls Paul an “egotist,” there’s no doubt: in an elevator, she lifts up her dress to reveal her mound and it’s practically a daughter’s incestuous teasing of Big Daddy, appearing revived. Vittorio Storaro captures the perv inflation as his camera scans Brando’s huge neck and menacing back in T-shirt, the latter suggesting the built-in curvatures of a nuclear power station’s emission stack. He still seems reduced of a great actor’s magnitude; for one, his debauched altogether—sometimes attractively brutish—hints of sloth and gulafests to come, and, two, his voice is getting even smaller, in the Truman Capote range. The vocals coming out of him don’t fit the framework of improv; he needs the corrective of meaningful dialogue to compensate. An example of impromptu wretchedness: stretched out on the floor of the rat-infested apartment, he rattles off some remembrances from his past about milking cows and getting cow shit on his shoes. While Bertolucci and Storaro capture the wintry estrangement of Paris, viewers may end up preferring they had used Paris more expressively—their idea of the city seems to be one too many metaphorical bridges to nowhere—and had refrained from the soft vaginal-toned colors because a dull glaze eventually seeps over the eyes. Immensely boosting the intended libidinous ambiance is Gato Barbieri’s music; the engulfing romanticism of the violins, flute, accordion and piano co-mingling with the horny jazzy sax is concupiscent, surging to levels the story only promises to get to. At other points, the score brings a disturbing ominousness not revealing much (Jeanne going through Paul’s pockets), occasionally so loud and fast as to jolt us out of the carnal mood, and Jeanne’s theme has sultry maturity beyond her basic girlishness. For almost fifty years after the release of Last Tango, Bertolucci was still grinning over the Kael and Mailer whipped-up verbosities and handjob pantings, although he wouldn’t discount the effects of their orgasms on the art house crowd, or refrain from coaxing United Artists to buy the reprint rights to use all of Kael’s in newpaper ads and as accompanying text for the movie’s DVD packages, her imprimatur positing the suspicion of lucrative deal making. Re-reading their essays, we sense these two overcompensating pugilists became punch drunk—Kael reeling from frenzied insistence Bertolucci is making the “breakthrough” prisoner of sex drama Mailer always wanted to make but hadn’t the wherewithal, and Mailer so woozy from Kael’s repeated jabs that while instinctively knowing the movie fails to blow us out of our seats he fumbles in trying to blame the movie’s conclusion for the lack of convincing revelation. These three provocateurs—one a sensualist peeping Tom, the second a sexual persona non grata and the third a chauvinist whore—pop their loads while pretending there’s no other “there” in the down low of the tango. Text COPYRIGHT © 1999 RALPH BENNER (Revised 2/2023) All Rights Reserved.
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