Love Is . . .

Love is good. Love is liberation. Love is unrestrained in this greatest cultural event since The Rite of Spring . . ., this “most powerfully erotic movie ever made,” which “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made” (the ecstasy is Pauline Kael’s, The New Yorker, October 28, 1972; the agony, mine). Last Tango in Paris, perhaps the most discussed film of the 1970s, and much of that even before it was officially released in America, has been so elevated to that heady world where hyperbole passes for criticism that one feels curmudgeonly to demur. Tango may be director Bernardo Bertolucci’s attempt to proclaim love as liberation, but in realization it says instead that love is exploitation; love here is male chauvinism deservant of the accolade; love in this powerful and jolting movie is sex and that alone.

Love is a worthy subject of film, but so is sex. Confusion of the two, or the quaint assumption that the two usually come together in life, leads often to that still raging, still vaguely witless war about the meaning of “pornography.” Is Tango porn? Is it art? No defensible objective criterion can be applied by way of answer; subjectively we can speak to the question, objectively we cannot. The strength of Tango is in its director’s control over his material, in Marlon Brando’s at times majestic portrayal of Paul, the American widower seeking a few days of sexual assuagement of his grief, in Maria Schneider’s Eve-ish Jeanne, the girl Paul debases, sodomizes, employs to divorce love from sex. The film prods thought but does not, in this reviewer, inspire Kael-ian raves. An aching depiction of the brutalization lurking behind at least some masculine sexuality merits commendation when, as in Tango, it is so stunningly well-made. But it is not, I think, an utterly honest film as its devotees insist; it bares Brando’s backside but no more, while exploiting Schneider’s exquisite body as in preliberation” days, and it is at times re-voltingly arty, movie-ish, hence inherently fake. Starring Schneider and Joe Smith, Last Tango in Paris would most likely have been admired but not adulated. It is ludicrous to make so much of the nudity in it just because it’s Brando stripping; it’s ludicrous, in fact, to make nudity the criterion of a film’s worth. Tango is strong in emotion, mechanistic in its sex (at moments it resembles a how-to film) but infused with a fine director’s sense of filmic expression.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Love is good. Love is liberation. Love is unrestrained in this greatest cultural event since The Rite of Spring . . ., this “most powerfully erotic movie ever made,” which “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made” (the ecstasy is Pauline Kael’s, The New Yorker, October 28, 1972; the agony, mine). Last Tango in Paris, perhaps the most discussed film of the 1970s, and much of that even before it was officially released in America, has been so elevated to that heady world where hyperbole passes for criticism that one feels curmudgeonly to demur. Tango may be director Bernardo Bertolucci’s attempt to proclaim love as liberation, but in realization it says instead that love is exploitation; love here is male chauvinism deservant of the accolade; love in this powerful and jolting movie is sex and that alone.

Love is a worthy subject of film, but so is sex. Confusion of the two, or the quaint assumption that the two usually come together in life, leads often to that still raging, still vaguely witless war about the meaning of “pornography.” Is Tango porn? Is it art? No defensible objective criterion can be applied by way of answer; subjectively we can speak to the question, objectively we cannot. The strength of Tango is in its director’s control over his material, in Marlon Brando’s at times majestic portrayal of Paul, the American widower seeking a few days of sexual assuagement of his grief, in Maria Schneider’s Eve-ish Jeanne, the girl Paul debases, sodomizes, employs to divorce love from sex. The film prods thought but does not, in this reviewer, inspire Kael-ian raves. An aching depiction of the brutalization lurking behind at least some masculine sexuality merits commendation when, as in Tango, it is so stunningly well-made. But it is not, I think, an utterly honest film as its devotees insist; it bares Brando’s backside but no more, while exploiting Schneider’s exquisite body as in preliberation” days, and it is at times re-voltingly arty, movie-ish, hence inherently fake. Starring Schneider and Joe Smith, Last Tango in Paris would most likely have been admired but not adulated. It is ludicrous to make so much of the nudity in it just because it’s Brando stripping; it’s ludicrous, in fact, to make nudity the criterion of a film’s worth. Tango is strong in emotion, mechanistic in its sex (at moments it resembles a how-to film) but infused with a fine director’s sense of filmic expression.