I Would Like to See It: Last Tango in Paris (Patreon)

An aging man, Paul (Marlon Brando), whose wife has recently and without explanation taken her own life. A young woman, Jeanne (Maria Schneider), on the verge of marriage. A chance meeting leaves them tangled in a contentiously anonymous affair which represents to each of them a chance to escape the suffocating prisons of their lives. In pursuit of that escape they inflict violence on one another, dehumanize themselves and each other, and finally realize by turns that they’ve merely succeeded in creating a new trap for themselves, a simulacra of their real lives inside which they can pretend they’re different people. A mattress on the floor in a ghostly apartment. A lover’s voice whispering the vilest filth imaginable into a trembling ear, just to see if something worse than his experience of living could occur. Both actors bring tremendous skill to bear on an occasionally uneven script, but Brando in particular is a ruined Greek statue made flesh, a man so consumed with grief you feel that you can see him crumbling into the sea before your eyes.

As Paul lives in a personal space turned transitory, an apartment within his hotel, so does Jeanne transform the transitory space where their affair unfolded into her first apartment with her husband. There is a tremendous tension between these two states, on the one hand anonymous and ephemeral, on the other secure and unchanging. Bertolucci renders this tension visible with elaborate and ingenious framing, his characters often bracketed by transoms, pillars, doorways, and other architectural features. In an early scene Jeanette pauses to examine a “for rent” sign on an apartment building, ducking behind a doorframe so that half the screen is eaten up by its black mass, a premonition of the nothingness she and Paul both desire on varying semi-conscious levels. Their desperate attempts to compartmentalize the emotions tearing at their lives become actual, physical barriers interposed between and around their bodies. Even color becomes a dividing line, the warm gold of a glass facade juxtaposed sharply with the cold gray stone of the adjoining building, Jeanette in front of one, Paul in front of the other.

Happiness, the film tells us, can only exist in a state of superposition, a sort of emotional Schrodinger’s Cat. The moment Paul tells Jeanette his name, the mystery and appeal of their relationship curls in on itself and dies. Schneider’s change in expression at the moment of collapse is an astonishing piece of facial acting, layered with interior and exterior denials and admissions. Paul hasn’t so much unraveled before her as he has come unforgivably into being, annihilating all the potential versions of himself with that single Biblical syllable. He sees it, like Henry VIII catching the disgust in Anne of Cleaves’ face before she could hide it, and pursues her from a dance hall down the street, finally forcing his way into her apartment, demanding that she still love him, that she know him. What’s left to know? A wad of chewing gum, flavorless and formless, shoved out of sight and soon forgotten.