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LEO BRAUDY
cultural object, the film has been drained of emotional life and whole–
ness.
It is paradoxical that
Last Tango in Paris
should have had all
this attention directed at its parts: are its sexy scenes sexy? are
Brando's monologues heartfelt or phoney? is the scene beside his wife's
coffin the best or the worst in the film? was it a mistake to show her
face or a masterful stroke? Paradoxical because the real subject of
Last Tango
is the elusiveness of objects, images, and characters, the
difficulty of making emotional connections, the elements of fraud–
ulence and theatricality in everyone's attempt to create his identity for
himself and for the world. In all his films Bertolucci seems drawn to
a painter's way of presenting the things of the world - the Vuillard
interiors of
The Conformist,
the Magritte-de-Chirico sense of the
isolation of open spaces that permeates
S,pider's Strategem,
the empty
rooms filled with distorted figures that
Last Tango
draws from the
works of Francis Bacon. Such painters convey an intimate, even
voyeuristic, sense of the worlds they view at the same time that they
emphasize the final mystery of the objects they show us - the bed–
spreads, the houses, the human bodies. They dramatize the inability
of the artist - and Bertolucci's camera - to force these objects to
yield their secrets. To take objects out of the film for interpretation
(and find them wanting, as do Simon and Kauffmann, among
others), or to disentangle the erotic scenes for praise or blame, ignores
their meaning as part of the emotional lives of the characters to make
them serve in the intellectual lives of the viewers. To emphasize with
Kael "the new realism" of the film or "the terror of actual experience
still alive on the screen" ignores Bertolucci's effort to convey the self–
consciousness through which real things become reality rather than
realism.
Both Jean Renoir and Roberto Rossellini use their films to con–
vey the evasiveness and elusiveness of human character, the illusion
of a "real" self, the basic irrelevance of psychological categories to
full understanding. Bertolucci in
Last Tango
puts his own particular
turn to this theme by using Brando's movie image to energize the
inauthentic attempts to be authentic that are essential parts of the
character Brando portrays. Everyone in
Last Tango
is cut off from
everyone else, and yet each has some vision of the proper way to
relate. Paul (Brando) thinks that by divesting himself of his past
