268
LEO BRAUDY
about the obscene dialogue in
M.A.S.H.
She obviously considers art–
istic innovation in film to occur principally in subject matter - plot
and dialogue. Fair enough; Lawrence
is
as important a creative art–
ist as Joyce, as far as literary history goes. Yet the true role of the
sexuality in
Last Tango
is the way the characters make it up and
manipulate it, not its realism, or its implicit statement against censor–
ship. "Breakthrough" is an oddly contrary word to use about a film
preoccupied with characters who desire for themselves and others an
impossible purity and self-sufficiency, and who use their sexual natures
to confirm and strengthen their separations from each other.
I liked
Last Tango
when I saw it, and I find it even more in–
teresting to think and talk about a few weeks later. Even though
I had tried to read as little of the "controversy" material as possible,
my first viewing of it was still poisoned by the atmosphere. But now
the dialogue can steep, the images can return, and the film reform
itself as an experience rather than an event. So many recent films
- Last Tango, Cries and Whispers, Chloe in the Afternoon
-
make
make demands on a combination of our intellectual and emotional
sympathy as viewers that are not unique but are certainly different
in degree from what we are used to in movies. More than any other
art, movies are tentative forms for the emotions of the audience,
forms that entrap you and relieve you of the self-consciousness of
being an audience, of being separate.
In
films like those I've just
mentioned, we are asked to involve ourselves in the partialities of the
characters and seek out their mystery in our own uncertainties. This
kind of emotional openness to the characters of a film is the first
victim of critical overkill and impossibly heightened expectations. The
richness of
Last Tango
is to show how human separations occur in
the head, no matter how clothed, naked, apart or connected the body.
Its strength is not in its sexual explicitness, its system of symbols, or its
scheme of characters, but in the insufficiency of those orders to ex–
plain finally what is going on.
