American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions

Chapter 5: Last Tango in Paris: Or Art, Sex, and Hollywood

Chapter 5 Last Tango in Paris or art, sex, and hollywood Last Tango in Paris is a hybrid film, part American star vehicle, part European art film. This film by an Italian director featuring two languages, English and French, is an excellent example of what I have elsewhere called the ‘‘Euro-American cinema.’’1 It combines elements of the American commercial cinema and the European art film in order to reach a broad audience and to represent a ‘‘between cultures’’ experience. The experience of cultures meeting and often conflicting can express both the new realities of modern transportation and communication and the subjective impression of being at home nowhere. Last Tango in Paris is included in this study of American cinema of the 1970s for two reasons. First, it is emblematic of an important cross-fertilization of European and American film in the period covered by this book. Ideas and talent flowed back and forth across the Atlantic; for example, Vittorio Storaro worked as cinematographer for both Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris) and Francis Coppola (Apocalypse Now, One From the Heart). Second, Last Tango in Paris had an enormous impact on American audiences. It earned about $40 mil- lion in the United States (an astonishing figure for an art film), and it was hotly debated in both the popular and the specialized press. Pauline Kael’s famous rave review of Last Tango in Paris begins by comparing the New York Film Festival showing of the film in 1972 to the opening night of Stravinski’s ‘‘Le Sacre du Printemps’’ in 1913. Both works are erotic and scandalous: ‘‘Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the ‘Sacre,’ the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism.’’ The film, like the ballet, hit the audience (per Kael) with astounding force: ‘‘This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made, so it’s probably only natural that an audience . . . should go into shock.’’2 Kael’s tone is hyperbolic, but the comparison to Stravinsky is apt. As André Boucourechliev points out about ‘‘Le Sacre du Printemps,’’ an audience can be shocked by a work of art only if it has a ground for understanding that work. If, on the other hand, an artwork is so original that the audience has no ground for understanding, scandal will not be possible.3 The achievement of Last Tango in Paris is therefore not to venture into completely unknown territory, but rather to present shocking images and ideas in a graspable idiom. By 1972, eroticism in film was well established in the avant-garde (Anger, Brakhage, Schneemann, Warhol), in the European art film (Fellini, Bergman, Godard), and in a range of pornography. Last Tango transposed the erotic to an intelligible, mass audience context by blending the European art film with the American popular cinema. From its very beginning, Last Tango in Paris indicates that it will challenge film genres and conventions. It opens with a credit sequence featuring two paintings by Francis Bacon, showing first a man, then a woman seated uncomfortably in the corner of a room (the paintings are ‘‘Double Portrait of Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach’’ [1964] and ‘‘Study for a Portrait’’ [1964]). The man seems to be wounded, in pain; the woman seems to be depressed. Both paintings, with their bright colors but fiercely unhappy subjects , suggest a context of masochism and desperation. The style is generally representational, yet the figures are distorted and twisted in powerfully expressive ways. Michel Leiris, in a description of Bacon’s mature works, says that the deformed figures are shaped by the painter’s instinct and that they address the spectator with unusual directness.4 The two paintings are accompanied by Gato Barbieri’s harsh saxophone, which dominates the musi78 american films of the 70s cal track. Though not as striking as the Bacon paintings, the music is far removed from the clichés of ‘‘movie music.’’ This introduction—paintings, music, and credits—already suggests that Last Tango will transgress the normal boundaries of the Hollywood film, where emotions are standardized and unhappiness is present only in extremely conventional forms. The first live image we see is of Paul (Marlon Brando) standing under the elevated Metro line at Passy and screaming ‘‘Fucking God!’’ as the Metro train passes overhead. This image...