You cannot shoot a scene that’s not in the original script, unless everyone participating in the scene has been informed and is on board. In July 2007, thirty-five years after Last Tango’s release, Maria Schneider (who was 19 when she shot the film) revealed in a Daily Mail interview that Bertolucci was “fat and sweaty and very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself, and would do certain things to get a reaction from me.” She added that Brando himself – at the age of 48, then, with some three decades of stage and screen acting behind him – felt manipulated. For today, most of the conversation around Last Tango isn’t about the film so much as the circumstances of the shooting of the scene where the Brando character violates the Schneider character anally, with the use of butter. And about how the depiction of sex can come to define a film. The man’s obsessiveness captures the obsession in Nabokov’s lines.īut what about actual (as opposed to suggested) sex? What Bertolucci showed in Last Tango is tame today, but the film remains a stunning example of how sex can define a relationship.
Lo-lee-ta.” Kubrick opens his film with the scene of a man painstakingly painting a girl’s toenails. Vladimir Nabokov begins his novel thusly: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
Also, we must consider that the starkness of images poses far more difficult problems than those posed by the written word.” The closest I have come to the rapture of sex on page making it to the big screen is in Stanley Kubrick’s take on Lolita. My own feelings about the controversial aspects of Last Tango (I saw it long after its release) were along the lines of what François Truffaut wrote in his book, The Films in my Life: “Unfortunately I cannot cite an erotic film that is the equivalent of Henry Miller’s writing (the best films, from Bergman to Bertolucci, have been pessimistic), but after all, freedom for the cinema is still quite new. What nobody had talked about was a sex film that would churn up everybody’s emotions.”
had expected artistic blue movies, talented directors taking over from the Schlockmeisters and making sophisticated voyeuristic fantasies that would be gorgeous fun – a real turn-on. Indeed, one of my favourite appraisals of the film (though, clearly, not one that I agree with) is by a user named Dave J on Rotten Tomatoes: “To some it’s one of those great films about a husband making attempts to get over his wife’s suicide by continually making out with a French escort played by Maria Schneider in which film critics Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars out of 4 and Leonard Maltin giving it 3 and a half out of 4, but if you’re watching it for pure enjoyment, I don’t find anything entertaining to see an wrinkled up overweight man (I don’t care whether or not he’s the greatest actor on earth) making out with a mediocre French actress with hairy armpits.”īut back then, a court in Bologna banned the film on the grounds of “obscene content offensive to public decency.presented with obsessive self-indulgence, catering to the lowest instincts of the libido, dominated by the idea of stirring unchecked appetites for sexual pleasure, permeated by scurrilous language.accompanied off screen by sounds, sighs and shrieks of climax pleasure.” On the liberal side of things, there was Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review: “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made. It’s a little hard, in this been-there-seen-that era, to grasp what a big deal Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was, upon its release in 1972.