Remembering Last Tango in Paris

1972 was one of the years that movies deeply engaged me and its highlight was United Artists' US release of Last Tango in Paris. If you were over 18 and paid $5.00 you experienced an up-close-and-personal alt-cinema appearance by Marlon Brando, an actor about whom I somehow knew nothing until my mother took me to see The Godfather where he played a supporting role. Although he worked well with The Godfather ensemble, the degree to which I found him uninteresting was difficult to express. My friend Lou Filosa suggested that I see The Young Lions, or The Men. I read "A Street Car Named Desire" for our all boys Molloy High School English Class and thought the movie version with Marlon Brando was an offense to the play. An English teacher at High School known simply as Mr. Jones, assigned many memorable books, the most traumatic being Orwell's 1984. Mr. Jones conveyed the notion that "Streetcar" was by a man writing about being a woman. So I experienced the story entirely from Blanche's perspective. It seemed silly that a highlight in the movie version was Brando yelling Stella. All the other characters surrounding Blanche were peripheral to her plight. (My awareness of changes to the texts of Tennessee Williams' work intensified after seeing a 1973 Broadway-bound production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at a Stratford Theater in Connecticut. The Stratford production, staged when Mr. Williams was alive, boasted its use of his original script. An example of a difference between it and its movie with Elizabeth Taylor is the choice of an ending line: "I wish I could believe that," instead of "There's life in the old girl yet.") Anyway, Marlon Brando had trouble remembering his lines, so in Last Tango he wrote his own. After hearing Patti Smith recall her friendship with Brando's co-star, Maria Schneider, I wondered whether this movie would ever be shown again, but yes, it was broadcasted on Showtime. I still have cable, which I started watching after September 11, 2001, and I sometimes search it for an interesting broadcast. There it was, Last Tango, scheduled for an obscure hour well into the future, but having found it I could set the broacast to "record," and now, weeks later, here it is, recorded and viewable on demand. I watched about twenty minutes of it. I was enjoying the cinematography (Look at the camera movement through the halls!) and I loved the moment when Ms. Schneider lets loose her hair, but I turned it off when Brando reached the point in his story where he went to his prom with cowshit on his shoes. I remembered that Ms. Schneider will tell him he's been "had" for revealing something of himself and then he'll say, how do you know I didn't just make it up, and then he'll go on to make up a whole lot more, including surprising her with a request to use butter to make possible their sodomy (non-coital sexual copulation) scene. Was his need to sodomize Ms. Schneider because his prostate was shaped like a potato? (I thought it was more of a hazing exercise to see if she could pass the initiation into his fraternity of one. Perhaps he was teaching her not to love him so that he would find it easier to accept it when she realized she did not. That won't stop him from chasing her, though.) I potentially love this kind of living room cinema, but yes there was a concern about Ms. Schneider, whom I also loved from afar. I'm remembering a story, but I don't know how I heard of it, that she was committed to an insane assylum from which she escaped with the help of her biker girlfriend. I saw no distinction between her and her co-star regarding age, social status, and acting ability. I only later realized that the movie was about Brando (and how he was not able to remember his lines...). Perhaps Bertollucci could have identified more with her. For some reason he was only identifying with Brando. Aha, in 1973 Robert Alley novelized the movie, and it was his book I read before seeing the movie (I saw it as a double feature with a kung fu movie on 42nd Street. With me was Cinema VII founder Mike Lindsay.) Mr. Alley helped introduce the movie (to those of us under 18) and included in his paperback book cute photos from the movie, such as one of Ms. Schneider wearing her father's military hat. Bertolucci does his best to make the movie fun, using Truffaut's Jean-Pierre Leaud accompanied by sweeping music by Gato Barbieri, but Last Tango in Paris is up there with the most depressing movies ever made. I must add, though, that if you are really depressed, it will help you feel better. So that's it for now. Bertollucci provides passive movie hero identification. It's easy to identify with someoneto whom everything happens, so Last Tango fits in with After the Revolution, and The Last Emperor, and The Conformist, and my favorite Bertolluci movie, Partner. Brando passive? Well, the happenstance provided by the script makes him so. It gives him an apartment worthy of Francis Bacon, it gives him his wife's inexplicable suicide, his wife's hotel, and a bubble gum girl who shares his interest in the vacant houses of Paris. And Schneider gets a documentary within the movie to allow her to tell her own fanciful story from her beautiful family manse. I'm remembering a movie called The Story of Joanna, a 1975 movie directed by Gerard Damiano and with that I conclude that Guys are in a rut. Again, I potentially like these movies. I potentially relate to them... I would like to express the male predicament but it too often involves further victimization. I thought the world of Prepare to Meet Your Maker provided that opportunity, and I furthered the problem in The Last Dodo, and perhaps in my version of Coppelia. Also I want to acknowledge movies that truly engage their cast. People were more willingly self-sacrificing for the sake of the movie in the 1960's and 1970's. The movies don't change, but our perceptions of them change...to the point where we don't even watch them.