14. Last Tango in Paris: The Skull Beneath the Skin Flick

JACK FISHER

CRITICS and commentators have hailed (or damned) the erotic elements of Last Tango in Paris so strongly that film audiences, unused to fine distinctions between “erotic” and “pornographic,” may be understandably disappointed to discover that the film is not essentially about sex. To expect to see Brando constantly scoring is to be unprepared for five-sixths of the movie’s running time and for the rather mysterious relationships between its many characters, who would be unnecessary in even a medium hard-core film.

True, Bernado Bertolucci has captured the aura of human sexuality very well in those parts of the film where he set out to do so; but Last Tango is chiefly concerned with the attempts of a number of people to alter the reality of their lives and the lives of those around them. Their attempts fail, and their failures lead them to confront the presence of death in their lives.

These attempts to make changes in their lives and the recognition of death as an aftermath of love tie the film firmly to the tradition of “Grand Romance.” As in other Romantic works, the first meeting of the lovers is marked by “bolt of lightning” recognition. Their social situation is hostile to their alliance. Both are committed to somebody else (Paul is committed to a dead woman, which is perfectly typical of the Romantic syndrome—see the Brontes). They occupy a nevernever place where their love can be consummated away from the world. Their affair is the “too perfect to last” variety. In fact, with a few important differences, Last Tango is a variation of Camille or One Way Passage.

The most important difference is the amount of overt sexuality—very little for a skin flick but a lot for a Romance. Equally important is the number of people involved. No mere two- or three-sided affair, the action is expanded to include Marcel and, as a living presence, Rosa, in addition to Paul, Jeanne, and Tom. In order to understand what is going on, we must keep in mind this five-sided relationship: while going with Tom, Jeanne becomes involved with Paul, who was married to Rosa, who was sleeping with Marcel. The pattern then has Paul as the connecting link between two sets of people, each of whom has a further and complicating relationship with someone else. The role of Paul is central to the entire schemata. We can begin by examining how he relates to Jeanne and to his dead wife Rosa—two women who are in many ways similar.

There is no question of Paul’s worldly or archetypal identity. He is the animal, the stud, the Heathcliff-like demon lover. He represents, as he says of himself, “the best fucking around.” Furthermore, he is a man of some mystery, whose background includes exotic places and romantic occupations—correspondent in Tokyo, revolutionary in South America. He is for Jeanne (and Rosa) the Romantic Stranger with awesome sexual power.

He is also a rather banal, irresponsible bum who, when he isn’t practicing his craft of humping, seems rather childlike, childish, and dull. Quiet, he projects a dark and somewhat dangerous quality. But he is not bright enough to stay quiet all the time and when he talks, even in Brando’s seductive tones, there emerges an adolescent masking his lack of maturity in virility. The two sides of Paul, suggested at the beginning by Francis Bacon’s title pictures, are the cause of all the trouble for everybody.

When Jeanne meets Paul, she is swept off her social stances. Her relationship with the filmmaker Tom has been typically youthful and uncontrollably exuberant. They are raucous children together, practicing mod arts of making movies and pretending to be the people in the film. They also live a life of respectable young bourgeoisie: they go together but they don’t sleep together. Paul fills in all that Tom has neglected. Jeanne is a child, but she is also a sensual woman. She has grown up in stuffy surroundings, dominated by a forbidding father. Paul provides sex, mystery, and not only domination but domination from a man almost her father’s age. She responds enthusiastically but, interestingly, she does not respond completely. She goes ahead with Tom and his movie and their life. Despite Paul’s gifts, she agrees to marry Tom.

The situation with Rosa was much the same. Rosa also came from a bourgeois background. When she met Paul the first time, she too succumbed to him sexually. Unlike Jeanne, she married him and the mysteries began. She took a lover, Marcel, who was very different from Paul, if not his opposite.

The repeated actions by Rosa and Jeanne suggest not only an affinity between them but a continuing deficiency in Paul. Whatever he has is not enough to keep them from hedging their commitments to him. One keeps a boy friend, the other takes one. The problem seems to be the perennial conflict between romance and reality. Paul is both demon and dullard.

Instead of resigning themselves to the problem, however, Rosa and, to a lesser extent, Jeanne try to do something about it. They begin to change the nature of reality, and they share this action with everyone else in the film. A minor character like Marcel makes a rather pedestrian attempt to alter the physical reality of his years by means of a secret chinning bar. For the major characters, the changing of reality is more obvious and more consequential and comprises the major action of the film.

Tom spends his entire film life creating a fantasy Jeanne who will conform to his own inner vision. His Jeanne will be very like Ava Gardner when she loved Mickey Rooney. This is appropriate, for Tom seems to want to be Andy Hardy when he was in love with Polly Benedict. Pursuing these changes, Tom rigs the facts of his movie. Then, confusing the real Jeanne with the creation of his ostensibly true documentary film, Tom begins to rig the facts of their real life as well. The imaginary Jeanne is quotable, Hollywood-zany alive, and despite being ultramod, she is pure. She is extravagant yet tender; hard-boiled, yet romantic. When he directs Jeanne to the point that she conforms to his vision, he proposes to her. Their marriage is to be an endless cinéma-verité, with him filming her—and thus correcting her—the rest of their lives. Jeanne is reluctant, then compliant; but when her compliance releases the buried Mickey Rooney in Tom, turning him into a Hollywood zany, she flees back to Paul.

For Paul, the battered survivor of a world he never imagined, the impulse to change things is just as pronounced as it is with Tom. In fact, except for extraneous details, Paul’s changes are exactly like Tom’s. He invents a world, he puts Jeanne into the world, and then he directs her as thoroughly as Tom has. He tells her what she can say, how she can react, what she can show. He involves her in the same kind of fictional cinéma-verité as Tom, but where Tom’s film is pregenital Hollywood, Paul’s “cinema” is post-permissive pornie. Where Tom’s world is talk to create the illusion of emotion, Paul’s world is all action to show the inadequacies of talk. Tom builds a world of Romance—the anticipation of Love. Paul builds a world of Lust—the denial of Love. They both assault Jeanne’s mind and sensibilities to change her, and when Paul has created an illusion of a girl who corresponds to his vision, he proposes to her exactly as Tom has done. Of course, Paul does not propose marriage, which would be appropriate to Tom’s world, but rather a kind of solemnization of their gypsy life in the apartment.

Jeanne, the object of the movie making, also wants to change things. To understand some of her motives, we must first look at Jeanne’s soul sister, Rosa. They share much, these two, the dead and last loves of Paul.

Put most simply, Rosa is looking for the perfect man and, failing to find him, sets about creating him. The perfect man, as a famous woman once said, is all brains above the waist and all peasant below. We have no doubts about Paul’s peasant parts, but above the waist he isn’t much. He resembles another Brando role, Stanley Kowalski, if he had attended a lesser Community College for a year: full of memory without understanding. Rosa, undeterred, looks further and finds Paul’s complement: Marcel. She then attempts to congeal the two lovers into one —same bathrobes, same whiskey. It doesn’t work very well. Marcel is meticulous, conscientious, and quasi-intellectual, but his physicality and ardor are limited. Even stimulated by Jack Daniels, he is no raving beast. After one frustrating session of “making love without passion” she leaps from the bed and begins tearing at the wall paper. At the obvious level, her action is a simple attempt at change— to make Marcel’s room white like Paul’s. At a deeper level, however, it is the first sign of destructive violence, the desperation which attends her inability to change the world. The men are separate, and she begins to accept it. Marcel is boring in bed, Paul is boring everywhere else. Her experiment is a failure, and in another tearing burst of violence, she slashes her throat with a stranger’s razor.

Jeanne is Rosa’s spiritual and social heiress, with two differences. Unlike Rosa, who had the age and experience to become the manipulator of her affairs, Jeanne is essentially manipulated at this stage. The other important difference is that Jeanne starts out with a Marcel-like partner and supplements him with Paul. She, too, is trying to build the perfect man, and naturally encounters the same problems as Rosa. But because she is young and extroverted, Jeanne’s destructiveness spills over onto others rather than turning inward.

Like Rosa, Jeanne tries to organize her life by changing her surroundings. Instead of repainting a room, however, Jeanne begins tentatively by bringing a record and player to the empty apartment. By this gift she begins, one must assume from the scenes in her mother’s apartment and father’s house, the process of stuffing the room with object-respectability. Objects equate with stability, and the bringing of objects suggests an attempt to stabilize her relationship with Paul. Jeanne’s panic when the furniture is removed not only reveals the extent of her Full-Room-Equals-Secure-Room ideas, but further links her with Rosa’s panic as she began to realize the futility of change.

The action of changing reality is a constant in the film, and produces a corollary: the search of the past. This obsession with the past, which all of the characters share, is apparently an attempt to understand reality as a preface to altering it—the searching of roots for the purpose of making change meaningful.

It is surprising how many people in Last Tango are either actively or passively reviewing their own past or someone else’s. Some of them collect the past rather neutrally—Marcel collects clippings for some unspecified job. Jeanne’s mother strokes a pair of old boots and receives “strange shivers” of memory. Some search the past for explanations, as Rosa’s mother ransacks her cupboards. Some collect the past for mysterious purposes never entirely explained, as Rosa collected objects left by guests—or ex-lovers. And some, like Jeanne, Tom, and Paul worry memories of the past for unspecified purposes. Whatever the reason, the result is to provide us with tantalizing insights into the reality of the people searching and searched.

Characteristically, Tom, the voyeur, does not search his own past but Jeanne’s. He seems to take her reality as a measure of his own—the Rooney-Gardner fantasy—and is defining himself intentionally through Jeanne. By very carefully selecting the material in her life, he is creating a reality he can assume. Like most cinéma-verité directors he is not searching for reality by the random assemblage of “facts,” but is attempting to document a reality he has already decided upon. With her reality established, his, by reflection, will be established also.

Jeanne remembers her past, as she seems to do everything, in a way satisfying to her audience. She can remember her father as a God and not the racist that she criticizes Olympia for being. She can remember the piano-playing cousin for Paul, the sensualist, as her first sex partner, her fellow masturbator (a role, incidentally, that Paul will assume in the Tango Palace). She can remember the same cousin for Tom, the romantic, as a “first love” who did “beautiful playing.”

As she works her way back through the past for Tom’s film, she reveals herself as a residual child used to being told what to do and what to believe. She also reiterates her kinship to Rosa in the random objects she has collected and saved. What emerges from this managed past is a kind of litmus paper-doll, totally responsive, and totally unequipped for the kind of memories she will have to deal with after Paul’s death.

Paul’s concern with the past is a surprise, since presumably he creates his fictional world to erect a barrier against the past. Nevertheless, he spends an inordinate amount of time shuffling through his real and imagined past. It is from his memories that we begin to sense the narrow suffocating limits of his personality. From his whole life he can think of only two pleasant memories: an old man drooling in his pipe and a dog trying to catch rabbits in the tall grass. The rest is negative: drunken parents, humiliation, vagrant wanderings, sexual liaisons which begin with cowshit covered shoes and proceed only to an enlarged prostate and a “nail.” (The use of this very special term for gonorrhea, and the existence of the dead wife, recall O’Neill’s drummer Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, a play also concerned with reality and illusion and the intrusion of death.)

After understanding the complementary actions of remembering and changing, we are ready to explore the final major action in the film, the recognition of and reaction to death. In a sense this is a continuation of the discovery and changing of life reality. Death is the discovery of the unchangeable reality.

When we begin to talk of death in Last Tango, the five-sided pattern shrinks, because death involves sexuality and neither concerns Tom. Like his brother photographer named Tom in Blow Up, he is a trivial person because his life has no sense of mortality. But when Blow Up Tom discovers death among his shots, he at least attempts to deal with it, while Tango Tom comes no closer than the grave of a romanticized dog. Tom is so committed to the ersatz life of his camera that when the issues become basic ones, he hasn’t the depth perceptions to confront them.

In this he is like one of the people directly involved with death. Marcel, who has many of the biases of a Tom grown middle-aged, simply shows confusion and some embarrassment at Rosa’s suicide. Like other people before him who are unable to understand death and whisper of conspiracies, Marcel is suspicious, wondering if Rosa really killed herself. Beyond that he is as helpless as Tom will be.

Paul and Jeanne are the principals in the death ritual, Jeanne unknowingly, Paul intentionally. His answer to Rosa’s death is to assert the only kind of life force he understands. Like the participants in rural parts of ancient Ireland who made love at the wake, Paul is screwing in honor of the corpse and as a challenge to it.

The association of death and sex is not unique to this film. Eighteenth century literature has many descriptions of orgasms as “dying” and the “little death.” What is unique here is the pronounced anality of the sex and its reflection in the visual imagery of the film.

The sodomy scene in Last Tango is the most shocking in the film. I am sure many of the moral objections to the film originate here. If the moment existed by itself and for itself, the objections would at least be understandable. But the scene is part of an entire pattern summed up in Paul’s statement about looking up the ass of death to the womb of fear. There are many bare asses in the film and each time one is shown, there is an association with death: the little boys shitting in Jeanne’s “jungle” who epitomize the death of the house and the life the house provided; the showing of Paul’s bare ass in the Tango palace, where the love affair has died amidst questions of his wife’s death.

There are also the scenes in which the ass or reference to the ass is an emblem for some new stage of relationship, and therefore the death of the previous condition. The appearance of the dead rat on the bed and Paul’s threat to save “the asshole” for Jeanne after he has eaten the rest are all part of Paul’s education of Jeanne. He is teaching her that “sacred and profane are the same thing,” that sex is of the body and nothing else. Reality, as being taught, consists of smells, filth, and fluids, and not the tidy definitions she has learned in her Larousse. The dictionary supplied descriptions and dimensions, while the teacher Paul supplies the consequences and conditions. For him, sex and shit are virtually synonymous.

This motif of “education” is very pronounced in the two anal sex scenes. In the first, the butter scene, Jeanne is being taught several lessons, only ’one of them related to Paul’s lust. She is being dominated and therefore being taught her role in their affair. This involves humiliation and pain, part of the reality of a sexual connection. And she is forced to repeat a strange catechism about the corruption of youngsters’ minds by the family and by teachers. This at the moment when she is being corrupted by her teacher! Without either of them being conscious of it, she is being instructed in mortality—the nature of the flesh— which is the first step in the recognition of death.

The second scene, in which she sodomizes him, is a sort of graduation thesis. Following his declaration about the ass of death and while she inflicts pain on him, he recites a virtual catalog of degradation. In this scene death is no longer merely the implied lesson. She is now confronted, in the image of the dead pig, with the direct connection between sex and death that is in Paul’s consciousness. When she has learned this, Paul is satisfied that she knows how the world is: she knows reality and has become a suitable consort for him.

With this bestial preparation and the MGM worldview she has learned from Tom, she is ready to confront the facts of Rosa’s death, the death of her affair, and the death of her lover. That Jeanne reacts as she does is traceable directly to the reality she has learned.

The cinematography of the sodomy sequence is a good point to begin consideration of the way Bertolucci visualizes this myth of reality and death. After a series of clinical closeups, short shots of Jeanne, Paul applying the butter, etc., the camera dollies away to an overhead long shot that depersonalizes the action. The shot is reminiscent of the way Arthur Penn handles the death of Buck in Bonnie and Clyde —the combination of macro/micro shots that pinpoints the individual human emotion and then in the long shot reviews the action calmly. The ritual of man and his environment—the flesh haiku.

The close-up and dolly shot are old-fashioned techniques of film, and they are characteristic of Bertolucci’s general approach in Last Tango. There is very little modern tricky camera work and editing: no jitter cuts, no freeze frames, or lingering lap-dissolves. Bertolucci seems to rely on impeccably composed shots; clean, efficient sequences; and authoritative editing, without mucking about with eccentricities. It is the straightforwardness of the shooting that gives the film its particular feeling and effect. Bertolucci seems both romantic and business-like, and he achieves a unique combination of voluptuousness and vérité. There is little of the brooding camera work typical of many directors today. Bertolucci is a tracker rather than a brooder—a Renoir rather than a Bergman. He has a penchant for shooting an object and then slowly panning to a person, but primarily he is a shot-sequence-cut director.

The importance of the shot cannot be exaggerated. It is the integer of attitude that not only provides what we see but forces us to see in a particular way, as the shots in the apartment will illustrate.

The problem is to represent a place that is strange, almost alien to the outside world. The place must house Paul’s mad experiment with altered reality; at the same time, it has to represent a place of passion and incipient emotion. The realization by Bertolucci and his set designer captures these qualities perfectly. The place is empty but not stripped, spacious but contained, light but not blinding, used but not condemned. Then Bertolucci and his cameraman transform the physical world into an emotional attitude. Through light that is high intensity and golden, the camera moves with deliberate, almost dignified tracking. While the ratty condition of the place is openly presented, our apprehension of it is positively conditioned. Bertolucci emphasizes the light, the airiness, the size very subtly, until the place becomes not only special in itself but a marked contrast to the dark over-stuffed interiors of the hotel and of the country house.

This contrast suggests something about the natural deceptiveness of the cinematography. The filming seems to be straightforward realism, but more is being presented than realism demands. Three shots reveal strong instances of Bertolucci’s expressionistic-realistic technique. The first shot involves a sign which comments on the shot. (This is a persistent technique in the film: the street sign, “Rue Jules Verne,” locates the apartment house and suggests that it is a place of fantasy; the use of the life preserver marked “L’Atalante” establishes a connection with the Jean Vigo film about romance and reality.) In the shot, Paul returns to his room and finds the door open. On the door is printed “PRIVE”, and inside the room Rosa’s mother is ransacking Rosa’s cupboards. Instantly the shot and the sign signify that at least part of the film is involved with the invasion of privacy by the outside world—the villain of all romances. A few minutes later the statement is reiterated with the shot of Paul closing the doors of the prying neighbors.

The next shot comes late in the film. Paul and Jeanne have left the Tango palace, and he is chasing her in the street. The camera dollies to an overhead long shot to reveal their separation by the street traffic—an echo of the scene in which the subway train separated Jeanne and Tom. In that scene, because Paul from the beginning had been visually associated with trains, the appearance of the train suggests Paul as the separating agent. In the street scene, the separation motif is recalled by means of the intruding outside world, specifically the mechanical outside world, the automotive equivalent of the mechanical people in the dance hall. In addition, the angle of the shot, the overhead long shot, recalls the sodomy scene and suggests a relationship between that connection and this separation.

The third shot I want to discuss is the final one in the film, in which Paul lies on the balcony to the right of the screen. The camera dollies back to reveal Jeanne in the left screen. The retreating camera makes a specific comment. If there were single shots—one on him, one on her, one on him, etc.—we would understand their relationship in a cause and effect dynamic. By the dollying back to reveal the total scene, we are presented with a reproduction, with changed figures, of the red and blue title pictures. In the titles, the red left screen suggested sensuality, the blue right screen suggested pensiveness. When the pictures are recalled, Jeanne occupies the red screen and Paul the blue, with the colors as well as positions repeated. (In Visconti’s The Damned, there is a dichotomy of red-orange and blue-grey, each color representing a whole spectrum of emotions and forces. By the end of that film the opposing colors are united into a vital death force. In Last Tango, the colors remain separated; and whatever meaning they have accrued remains opposed.) The most obvious meanings in the shot are that the blue is death, and the red is the sensual excuses to avoid death—which is the action of the film.

The sequence is a series of shots at one point in time and space, which maintains a consistent point of view. Bertolucci uses his sequences with remarkable efficiency. By arrangement and perfect composition of the shots within the sequence, he articulates precise aspects of his total statement. Each of the apartment sequences, for example, is different not only in story material but in the visual attitude which in turn complicates the thematic information. The accumulation of these sequences develops and refracts the original scene of sexual attraction and consummation. By packing the sequences with details, something is said about the nature of the developing relationship which is far more than a report on two people making out.

The two sequences which I want to examine briefly have the tight efficiency and burgeoning detail of the others, and also relate obviously and directly to the reality—death action. The first is really two sequences: the funeral room and the incident of the whore and her customer. In the funeral room Paul begins to talk to the corpse. As with Jeanne, he is arranging the reality of the situation to conform to his acceptance of it. He simply dismisses Rosa’s death for the moment and treats her as if she were alive. The pretense goes so far that he removes her make-up because that isn’t the way the living Rosa is supposed to look. There is a knock on the door in the lobby, and Paul goes downstairs after informing the corpse where he is going.

The new sequence begins with the whore and her customer at the door. The whore is a friend of Rosa’s and her macabre appearance—the aged face plastered with make-up—instantly states a relationship with the made-up corpse who didn’t wear make-up. The customer leaves and Paul chases him through empty, desolate streets. When Paul corners him, the man excuses himself with a story about his wife being “enough for him until she developed a disease”—again, an instant reminder of Paul’s situation, which accounts in part for his violence. He punches the man and illogically calls him a faggot as an excuse for violence, in still another action of changing reality to conform to his emotional need of the moment. Paul then walks away in the early morning light which is a strange combination of the warm golds of sex and the blue whites of death. He passes a sign which says “La Bohême.” As the earlier sign shots have made comments, this sign makes a comment not only on the sequence at hand, but on the whole film. Here in the threatening dawn, a defeated man walks back to a flop house to his waxen-dead wife and her decayed friend, to explain the loss of a sale of flesh. This is the reality of La Bohême, the romantic land of exuberant loves without responsibilities, of happy whores who never charge customers, of deaths that are beautiful and ennobling—the romantic dream which disguises (changes) a life filled with pain, confusion, exploitation, and defeat.

The other sequence, in the Tango palace, worries this same view of reality with ruthless precision and ties up the different threads of the action. The fluorescent blue-white light immediately suggests the suicide room, where Paul’s other love affair died. The suggestion is reenforced by everything that happens in the sequence, when Bertolucci suddenly begins to work with unabashed expressionism. The rituals of the Tango are stiffened to a Byzantine kind of dehumanization. Social man is pictured as a precisely grotesque dance contestant. All human connection is reduced to a matter of technique. All emotion is practiced and performed.

Into this arena of created life, the two lovers drag the exhausted remains of their created love. The collision between the two creations reveals reality: the world is whirling manikins, and a bum and his bimbo haven’t got a chance. The sequence concludes with a final attempt by the lovers to escape. They slump into a dark corner and defy the world by a parody of love—jacking off before they go to look for their own special razor.

Most of the statement of this sequence has been accomplished by purely cinematic means. The words are important, but we know beforehand what will be said. The important message is delivered by brilliant shots and jarring cuts, which establish a revealing montage between lovers and dancers. The result is a distillation of the real meaning of the entire film: a myth of reality and death with man disguising his mortality with practiced rituals of escape. A film, in short, that seems to be a skin flick but is really a study that probes nerves, sinews and essences.

Last Tango belongs not with the works of Russ Meyer but rather, curiously, with the works of the seventeenth century dramatist John Webster, of whom T. S. Eliot said, “Webster was much possessed by death/He saw the skull beneath the skin.” What Eliot meant was not that other Elizabethan dramatists avoided death in their works but that Webster more than others, saw all actions—including his rather kinky views of sex—as a prelude to dying.

Webster was not a popular playwright. His audiences, who expected heroics and death full of purpose, were disappointed with his nihilistic slaughters. And so will many people be disappointed with Bertolucci’s death flick. Even sexually liberated audiences will find small comfort in an erotic film which suggests that love, at best, is a creation to feed our evasive fantasies and that reminds us that flesh provides only a momentary respite from the knowledge we are dying.