I once loved Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” A memoir and new movie based on the life of Maria Schneider had me revisit the film, which I now found so upsetting as to be unbearable.
I despised that movie right from the get-go. I didn’t see it in a theater, I know that. I’m guessing I rented it at some video store. I don’t know if I even watched the entire movie--I either missed the anal rape or I've blocked it--but I saw enough to judge it not as art but as one more attempt at exploitative shock to sell movies.
The ugliness of the sex between them seemed so theatrical, so pointedly awful, I didn't feel anything but anger. Not sadness, not disgust, not titillation--just anger. I wondered for a long time why either actor would agree to take part in such a terrible movie. Especially Brando, who was so good in his other movies, so true to his own unique talents, and yet was so utterly and obviously uncomfortable in this role. (I'm guessing Bertolucci was the draw. If it had been anyone else, he might not have done it.)
But at the same time, it didn't shock me that it made waves. I rented it, didn't I? I saw "I am Curious Yellow", I saw "Deep Throat", I saw "9 1/2 Weeks", I read "Fear of Flying", I read Nancy Friday, I read Anaïs Nin...so it wasn't as if I was sheltered. But I hated every Hollywood thing about it. (Though Bertolucci would have hated the reference.)
But I have to say, your take, as always, is fascinating. You go deep, you look at all sides, you personalize your findings, and you make it so damned interesting I wouldn't think of quitting until I'd read the entire thing. So thank you once again. And please keep it up. 😉
“So theatrical, so pointedly awful”—so well said by you.
And thank you. I do sometimes think I’m not made for substack, but there are just a few people—you are one of them—whose appreciation and participation keeps me going.
I think it's your own enthusiasm for these things that keeps you going, and I'm grateful for that. Your take on everything you present here is thoughtful and nuanced and clever. Even if I haven't seen the movie, you get me to thinking, and that's always a good thing. 💕
Thank you. And yes, it’s my own desire to write about what I write about that keeps me writing in general. But I sometimes think I don’t fit very well into the substack world—especially as it seems to be evolving lately. But then I think of particular people rather than “the substack world” and I feel fine.
With the abject primitive "honesty" of the pornographic product in mind, in my opinion, Tango, and many other films, new and dated, are pretexts for the writer/director.producers to simply make a porn film. There was a need, by the way, in the 60s, to insert (cough) some "socially redeeming value" in the porn, to render it into "art", and therefore bypass at least some censorship which could potentially shut the thing down commercially. In Tango the anal "sex" scene, the porn payload, as it were, is slathered, as it were, in pseudo psycho-social-political blather--a smoke screen poorly sublimating Bertolucci's old world pornographic fantasies and repressions thereof--fantasy and repression go together like Love and Marriage-- and his need to manipulate and dominate a young woman into acting them out for him, to play his voodoo doll to stick his pin in, (as it were).
Pauline Kael’s good friend (forgot his name for the moment) said to her, as they left the movie, “well that was just a dirty movie.” She never discussed the movie with him again. (They remained friends.) I love how you put it: “ in Tango the anal "sex" scene, the porn payload, as it were, is slathered, as it were, in pseudo psycho-social-political blather--a smoke screen poorly sublimating Bertolucci's old world pornographic fantasies.”
(BTW, in my book The Male Body I discuss censorship and how filmmakers tried to evade it with “redeeming” value. I discuss biblical-themed movies, Streetcar Named Desire” and others.)
I didn’t see Last Tango until fairly recently, but knew something of its reputation. Maybe it’s why I saw a twenty year old actress assaulted, then stalked by a man more than twice her age as clearly predatory. I knew she wasn’t play-acting her pain. Bertolucci was a rapist by proxy, and what you say he deserved would be the minimum. Paul got what he deserved and the end of the movie points to the real liberation, a thing that liberal me hasn’t always wanted to admit, that maybe we aren’t equal or safe until we are armed. Last Tango was so repulsive that I don’t know if I could stand to watch “Being Maria”; further exploitation of Schneider would be too much. That the actors don’t know what they feel tells me what I will probably feel. Dillon struggles, “he didn’t mean to exploit Maria.”? Yes he/they did exactly that. I hope our culture can learn that having an artistic talent,or success of any type, never licenses rape and abuse. No amount of or quality of art can make up for Maria Schneider’s lifetime of suffering, or for the number of times others used the movie as templates for their aggressions, which is the lazy way to get what you want, so of course it was copied.
“Being Maria” isn’t a great film, but it’s a good film, and doesn’t exploit Schneider or Annamarie. It’s clear that the (female) writer/director’s alteration of certain scenes from the original movie was done to avoid that. For me, the main value of it, though, was in the exposure of how that scene was made (I didn’t know before), which then pointed me to her cousin’s book. The acting was excellent, too—even clueless Matt Dillon!
Wow, I really liked your final sentence, “templates for their aggressions, which is the lazy way…” That puts it in a nutshell for me, my understanding — of this, and 50 Shades.
I don't know enough to critique the film intellectually. I do believe that many directors feel entitled to manipulate female actors in ways they would not manipulate male actors.
I believe that humans are fundamentally misogynistic, at least the civilized ones. While there may be indigenous exceptions, human civilizations traditionally treat women as though they are to be used in ways men are not used. Women are denied power; men are entitled to it. This is anecdotal and may be disputed, but it is a reality I have come to accept. Men are as trapped as women in a construct that complicates and twists the essential relationships between men and women.
Bertolucci simply used his power to express his rage and used people to do it. He lied and manipulated and retained his respectable reputation. If he hadn't lied, if he owned it, I could respect him somewhat for expressing the rage at how relationships are truncated by the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of human society.
Why did breaking norms involve so much misogyny? Funny that you mentioned Norman Mailer who was just such a pig in his personal life. Why was being a pig considered so ‘avant garde’. In the effort to break out of bourgeois norms some sort of honor or kindness or decency was lost. And as usual women were the losers in that.
I have a whole chapter in my book on The Male Body about the male rebellion of the late fifties and sixties. “Playboy” was a big part of the linking of anti-bourgeois norms to the sexualization of women’s bodies. Maybe I should make a stack out of a part of that chapter….!
I remember Anais Nin hated that movie and wished that she had killed him earlier. She was a minority opinion at the time, but definitely right. I just remember watching in college and thinking that it was messed up. I did see some tragedy in Brando trying to actually treat her like a human being and getting killed for it, but mostly I agreed with the very smartass EW review of "Brando says things like I want to get a pig to fuck you and then wonders why it doesn't work out. It's European"
Thank you for a laugh—over the Nin and the EW comments.
If she had killed him earlier, we also would have been spared that ostentatiously artsy ending. Which the internet reviewers are still genuflecting to. Uggh.
It was a very disturbing film. I had a similar experience with Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. I was thrilled by him as a child. When I saw the film again as an adult, I realized what a trauma response that was.
Robert Mitchum also gave a stunning, and very disturbing, performance as a psychotic killer in “The Night of the Hunter,” the only film directed by Charles Laughton. There must have been something, some quality, in his acting and appearance that was particularly effective for such parts, although I haven’t seen “Cape Fear.” Don’t let my description put you off seeing it, however, as it is a classic and filmed in a dreamlike black and white.
I’ve seen it. It’s a good thriller, but “Night of the Hunter” is a classic. Mitchum, as you say, was good for such parts. His whole face had a sullen aspect to it. I’m sure I saw him in roles where he smiled, but I honestly can’t remember what he looked like in them. Only the creepy ones. I know my mother thought he was sexy—but I couldn’t see it.
His long career included roles as completely unnerving as the ones we’ve named, and a quintessential film noir, perhaps the greatest, “Out of the Past,” with its classic themes of encirclement and entrapment. Even in the wholesome “”Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,” he enacts a menacing enough episode of binge drinking to make it plausible that the poised novice nun played by Deborah Kerr would flee, terrified, into a driving tropical rainstorm.
What a brilliant review and reflection on a cultural moment when the debasement of women on film became not only accepted as life but also sometimes exalted as rhe highest form of art. Today there is nothing that is untouched by rape culture and anyone and everyone can be a "porn star" - and many girls and women resort to webcam side gigs to survive "free" market capitalism or, worse, are subjected to DIY shorts with long lives on the Internet illegally and without their own consent (through the scourges of trafficking and revenge porn).
Rewatching the most recent adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover I am struck that an intimacy coordinator who was meant to protect the actors allowed a choking scene as Mellors' power move when Constance levels the class difference between them and Mellors's experience of ecstasy to dominate the depiction of her anal rape in their final sexual act when he punishes her for her sister's disdain. When you read the scene it's clear he was lying in wait to assault her that evening. This sets the tone for the rest of the relationship (left ambiguous in the novel but made concrete in the film); when they meet again in Scotland his embrace from behind with his arm around her neck indicates that it is not her liberation that was the point of the wretched book at all but his. She gives up everything to become his property, to do with as he will. In the book even Lord Chatterley accedes that this is a man's sexual "right" and no other man's business, whatever his social status.
Thank you for your comment on my stack—and your paragraph on the adaption of Lady Chatterly. As someone who is extremely interested in how movies revise books (have you read my stack on “Lolita”?), often in the interests of making the male fantasies in the book even more so, I’m now wanting to see that film!
I was 16 in 1973, a liberated and budding feminist raised in the tumult of San Francisco. I heard the buzz and went to see Last Tango in the theater. I walked out during the first sex scene. It offended my adolescent sensibilities that this beautiful young woman would submit to this gross older man — in my mind, this was a male fantasy that objectified the female character and would surely only get worse as it dug deeper into the male psyche at the expense of the young woman. Feeling vindicated lo these 52 years later, but horrified at the lifelong, tragic consequences for Schneider. Fuck Bertolucci and his ilk.
I was living in Italy when I saw it, early 70s; an American student, my specialty was film studies. And all of us were dazzled by Bertolucci’s cinematography, as well (I personally was blown away by The Damned). (And perhaps influenced, sexually, by the film!) But as you have written, I have by now completely come over to your way of thinking. And I wonder, in a way, if 50 Shades of Grey is a 21st c Last Tango. Not as well filmed, of course, or written, but a best-seller — all about one man’s control of a woman sexually. Against which she eventually rebels. It’s very similar, when you think about it. Your article is impressive and so clearly written, it filled my head with my own memories of the steps feminism was taking then - where it is now. Thanks!
You’re so welcome! The main difference actually makes it worse: in 50 shades she falls in love with him and he with her and it’s all a fairy tale version of “a good woman makes the difference.” We were spoon-fed that fantasy in almost every movie (and Disney cartoon) At least in Tango, she kills him.
My cousin and I slipped in, underage, to a screening of “Last Tango” in 1973. We’ve regretted it ever since. For years, we couldn’t even look at a heat-distorted stick of butter without imagining that the grownups were right about those age restrictions.
Thanks for this. It’s extraordinary. I saw the film in the late 80’s and found it disturbing but appreciated that it was considered a classic by most. I can now finally conclude it is awful.
Dearest Everyone Who Comments:
I always take a day’s break after I finish a stack. But I will return tomorrow to respond to your comments!!
Susan.
I despised that movie right from the get-go. I didn’t see it in a theater, I know that. I’m guessing I rented it at some video store. I don’t know if I even watched the entire movie--I either missed the anal rape or I've blocked it--but I saw enough to judge it not as art but as one more attempt at exploitative shock to sell movies.
The ugliness of the sex between them seemed so theatrical, so pointedly awful, I didn't feel anything but anger. Not sadness, not disgust, not titillation--just anger. I wondered for a long time why either actor would agree to take part in such a terrible movie. Especially Brando, who was so good in his other movies, so true to his own unique talents, and yet was so utterly and obviously uncomfortable in this role. (I'm guessing Bertolucci was the draw. If it had been anyone else, he might not have done it.)
But at the same time, it didn't shock me that it made waves. I rented it, didn't I? I saw "I am Curious Yellow", I saw "Deep Throat", I saw "9 1/2 Weeks", I read "Fear of Flying", I read Nancy Friday, I read Anaïs Nin...so it wasn't as if I was sheltered. But I hated every Hollywood thing about it. (Though Bertolucci would have hated the reference.)
But I have to say, your take, as always, is fascinating. You go deep, you look at all sides, you personalize your findings, and you make it so damned interesting I wouldn't think of quitting until I'd read the entire thing. So thank you once again. And please keep it up. 😉
“So theatrical, so pointedly awful”—so well said by you.
And thank you. I do sometimes think I’m not made for substack, but there are just a few people—you are one of them—whose appreciation and participation keeps me going.
I think it's your own enthusiasm for these things that keeps you going, and I'm grateful for that. Your take on everything you present here is thoughtful and nuanced and clever. Even if I haven't seen the movie, you get me to thinking, and that's always a good thing. 💕
Thank you. And yes, it’s my own desire to write about what I write about that keeps me writing in general. But I sometimes think I don’t fit very well into the substack world—especially as it seems to be evolving lately. But then I think of particular people rather than “the substack world” and I feel fine.
I do the same in my writing. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for someone, and when they let me know, I’m good to go again!
“It’s not for everyone… .” Good point.
Excellent article, as always.
With the abject primitive "honesty" of the pornographic product in mind, in my opinion, Tango, and many other films, new and dated, are pretexts for the writer/director.producers to simply make a porn film. There was a need, by the way, in the 60s, to insert (cough) some "socially redeeming value" in the porn, to render it into "art", and therefore bypass at least some censorship which could potentially shut the thing down commercially. In Tango the anal "sex" scene, the porn payload, as it were, is slathered, as it were, in pseudo psycho-social-political blather--a smoke screen poorly sublimating Bertolucci's old world pornographic fantasies and repressions thereof--fantasy and repression go together like Love and Marriage-- and his need to manipulate and dominate a young woman into acting them out for him, to play his voodoo doll to stick his pin in, (as it were).
Excellent comments, as always!!
Pauline Kael’s good friend (forgot his name for the moment) said to her, as they left the movie, “well that was just a dirty movie.” She never discussed the movie with him again. (They remained friends.) I love how you put it: “ in Tango the anal "sex" scene, the porn payload, as it were, is slathered, as it were, in pseudo psycho-social-political blather--a smoke screen poorly sublimating Bertolucci's old world pornographic fantasies.”
(BTW, in my book The Male Body I discuss censorship and how filmmakers tried to evade it with “redeeming” value. I discuss biblical-themed movies, Streetcar Named Desire” and others.)
I didn’t see Last Tango until fairly recently, but knew something of its reputation. Maybe it’s why I saw a twenty year old actress assaulted, then stalked by a man more than twice her age as clearly predatory. I knew she wasn’t play-acting her pain. Bertolucci was a rapist by proxy, and what you say he deserved would be the minimum. Paul got what he deserved and the end of the movie points to the real liberation, a thing that liberal me hasn’t always wanted to admit, that maybe we aren’t equal or safe until we are armed. Last Tango was so repulsive that I don’t know if I could stand to watch “Being Maria”; further exploitation of Schneider would be too much. That the actors don’t know what they feel tells me what I will probably feel. Dillon struggles, “he didn’t mean to exploit Maria.”? Yes he/they did exactly that. I hope our culture can learn that having an artistic talent,or success of any type, never licenses rape and abuse. No amount of or quality of art can make up for Maria Schneider’s lifetime of suffering, or for the number of times others used the movie as templates for their aggressions, which is the lazy way to get what you want, so of course it was copied.
“Being Maria” isn’t a great film, but it’s a good film, and doesn’t exploit Schneider or Annamarie. It’s clear that the (female) writer/director’s alteration of certain scenes from the original movie was done to avoid that. For me, the main value of it, though, was in the exposure of how that scene was made (I didn’t know before), which then pointed me to her cousin’s book. The acting was excellent, too—even clueless Matt Dillon!
Wow, I really liked your final sentence, “templates for their aggressions, which is the lazy way…” That puts it in a nutshell for me, my understanding — of this, and 50 Shades.
I don't know enough to critique the film intellectually. I do believe that many directors feel entitled to manipulate female actors in ways they would not manipulate male actors.
I believe that humans are fundamentally misogynistic, at least the civilized ones. While there may be indigenous exceptions, human civilizations traditionally treat women as though they are to be used in ways men are not used. Women are denied power; men are entitled to it. This is anecdotal and may be disputed, but it is a reality I have come to accept. Men are as trapped as women in a construct that complicates and twists the essential relationships between men and women.
Bertolucci simply used his power to express his rage and used people to do it. He lied and manipulated and retained his respectable reputation. If he hadn't lied, if he owned it, I could respect him somewhat for expressing the rage at how relationships are truncated by the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of human society.
More to come a bit later.
I feel the same way
Why did breaking norms involve so much misogyny? Funny that you mentioned Norman Mailer who was just such a pig in his personal life. Why was being a pig considered so ‘avant garde’. In the effort to break out of bourgeois norms some sort of honor or kindness or decency was lost. And as usual women were the losers in that.
I have a whole chapter in my book on The Male Body about the male rebellion of the late fifties and sixties. “Playboy” was a big part of the linking of anti-bourgeois norms to the sexualization of women’s bodies. Maybe I should make a stack out of a part of that chapter….!
Yes! Please share that! Your writing on Last Tango is so compelling!
That seems to still be going on in our society: trump & maga vs woke Dems…
I remember Anais Nin hated that movie and wished that she had killed him earlier. She was a minority opinion at the time, but definitely right. I just remember watching in college and thinking that it was messed up. I did see some tragedy in Brando trying to actually treat her like a human being and getting killed for it, but mostly I agreed with the very smartass EW review of "Brando says things like I want to get a pig to fuck you and then wonders why it doesn't work out. It's European"
Thank you for a laugh—over the Nin and the EW comments.
If she had killed him earlier, we also would have been spared that ostentatiously artsy ending. Which the internet reviewers are still genuflecting to. Uggh.
It was a very disturbing film. I had a similar experience with Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear. I was thrilled by him as a child. When I saw the film again as an adult, I realized what a trauma response that was.
I suspect our generation of women would have that reaction today to many films that we once loved.
BTW, I always found Robert Mitchum kind of repulsive.
Robert Mitchum also gave a stunning, and very disturbing, performance as a psychotic killer in “The Night of the Hunter,” the only film directed by Charles Laughton. There must have been something, some quality, in his acting and appearance that was particularly effective for such parts, although I haven’t seen “Cape Fear.” Don’t let my description put you off seeing it, however, as it is a classic and filmed in a dreamlike black and white.
OH, and thank you so much for the paid sub!!
I’ve seen it. It’s a good thriller, but “Night of the Hunter” is a classic. Mitchum, as you say, was good for such parts. His whole face had a sullen aspect to it. I’m sure I saw him in roles where he smiled, but I honestly can’t remember what he looked like in them. Only the creepy ones. I know my mother thought he was sexy—but I couldn’t see it.
His long career included roles as completely unnerving as the ones we’ve named, and a quintessential film noir, perhaps the greatest, “Out of the Past,” with its classic themes of encirclement and entrapment. Even in the wholesome “”Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,” he enacts a menacing enough episode of binge drinking to make it plausible that the poised novice nun played by Deborah Kerr would flee, terrified, into a driving tropical rainstorm.
What a brilliant review and reflection on a cultural moment when the debasement of women on film became not only accepted as life but also sometimes exalted as rhe highest form of art. Today there is nothing that is untouched by rape culture and anyone and everyone can be a "porn star" - and many girls and women resort to webcam side gigs to survive "free" market capitalism or, worse, are subjected to DIY shorts with long lives on the Internet illegally and without their own consent (through the scourges of trafficking and revenge porn).
Rewatching the most recent adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover I am struck that an intimacy coordinator who was meant to protect the actors allowed a choking scene as Mellors' power move when Constance levels the class difference between them and Mellors's experience of ecstasy to dominate the depiction of her anal rape in their final sexual act when he punishes her for her sister's disdain. When you read the scene it's clear he was lying in wait to assault her that evening. This sets the tone for the rest of the relationship (left ambiguous in the novel but made concrete in the film); when they meet again in Scotland his embrace from behind with his arm around her neck indicates that it is not her liberation that was the point of the wretched book at all but his. She gives up everything to become his property, to do with as he will. In the book even Lord Chatterley accedes that this is a man's sexual "right" and no other man's business, whatever his social status.
Thank you for your comment on my stack—and your paragraph on the adaption of Lady Chatterly. As someone who is extremely interested in how movies revise books (have you read my stack on “Lolita”?), often in the interests of making the male fantasies in the book even more so, I’m now wanting to see that film!
Wow!
I take this as a compliment, and I thank you!
It’s definitely a huge compliment
I was 16 in 1973, a liberated and budding feminist raised in the tumult of San Francisco. I heard the buzz and went to see Last Tango in the theater. I walked out during the first sex scene. It offended my adolescent sensibilities that this beautiful young woman would submit to this gross older man — in my mind, this was a male fantasy that objectified the female character and would surely only get worse as it dug deeper into the male psyche at the expense of the young woman. Feeling vindicated lo these 52 years later, but horrified at the lifelong, tragic consequences for Schneider. Fuck Bertolucci and his ilk.
Yes. Fuck him and his ilk. (“Ilk” includes entire Trump administration.)
I was living in Italy when I saw it, early 70s; an American student, my specialty was film studies. And all of us were dazzled by Bertolucci’s cinematography, as well (I personally was blown away by The Damned). (And perhaps influenced, sexually, by the film!) But as you have written, I have by now completely come over to your way of thinking. And I wonder, in a way, if 50 Shades of Grey is a 21st c Last Tango. Not as well filmed, of course, or written, but a best-seller — all about one man’s control of a woman sexually. Against which she eventually rebels. It’s very similar, when you think about it. Your article is impressive and so clearly written, it filled my head with my own memories of the steps feminism was taking then - where it is now. Thanks!
You’re so welcome! The main difference actually makes it worse: in 50 shades she falls in love with him and he with her and it’s all a fairy tale version of “a good woman makes the difference.” We were spoon-fed that fantasy in almost every movie (and Disney cartoon) At least in Tango, she kills him.
My cousin and I slipped in, underage, to a screening of “Last Tango” in 1973. We’ve regretted it ever since. For years, we couldn’t even look at a heat-distorted stick of butter without imagining that the grownups were right about those age restrictions.
Thanks for this. It’s extraordinary. I saw the film in the late 80’s and found it disturbing but appreciated that it was considered a classic by most. I can now finally conclude it is awful.
The whole rape scene makes me literally want to vomit. Disgusting and disturbing and ultimately criminal.