Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives. Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex-sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael.īernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913-the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed-in music history. The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972.
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