PARTISAN REVIEW
267
(another favorite theme of Bertolucci's) he can strengthen his jellied
ego. Jeanne (Maria Schneider) thinks she can split herself between
the abasements of her relationship to Brando and the worship she
gets from Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young filmmaker who is
making a cinema verite film of her life as a prelude to their marriage.
Leaud is Bertolucci's attack on the New Wave implication that all
you have to do is follow someone long enough and ask the right ques–
tions and you'll understand
him.
(The sinking life preserver marked
"L'Atalante" makes the satire more obvious.)
The "L'Atalante" reference is a false step, for Bertolucci isn't
concerned with such explicit and separable images, but with the
manipulation of self-image that his characters go through to shore
themselves up in crisis. Bertolucci's critics behave like his charac–
ters, trying to take the sexual scenes out of context or trying to
reduce each other to some psychic formulation that like Lady Bran–
don in
Dorian Gray
either explains people away or tells you every–
thing about them except what you want to know. The psychological
schema that ends with Schneider killing Brando as an amalgam of
unknown rapist and resurrected father counterpoises Brando's desire
at the beginning of the film not to see her as a problem, with a past
susceptible to Freudian analysis; his refusal to ask any questions that
by their desire for answers will limit
his
experience of her or of
him–
self. Bertolucci's characters aren't looking for relation with others,
love, for friendship, or for happiness. They are looking for salvation.
And each is continually changing the nature of
his
particular salva–
tion without telling anyone else. Paul's way is ultimately as cut off as
either Jeanne's or Tom's. When she wants
him
to come without touch–
ing, he agrees to try.
Newsweek
calls that scene "the movie's one pure–
ly carefree encounter." It may be funny and seem carefree, but it's
horrible at the same time - another example of the use of sexual
power to avoid emotional connection. Neither Paul, with his obvious
attempts to work up feelings he doesn't have, nor Jeanne, with her
inability to connect her lives with Paul and Tom, can marry emotion
with action, either through violence or tenderness.
Is the search for salvation through cultural experience any less
deluded than the search for salvation through sexual experience that
Last Tango
so clearly anatomizes? Pauline Kael calls the sexual rela–
tionships in
Last Tango
a breakthrough. She said a similar thing
