Postmodern Cinema Approach – The Last Tango in Paris
For a span of about fifteen minutes, from the beginning of the opening credits sequence until Paul and Jeanne make love against the window and then leave the apartment where they will spend much of the film together, this film is the glory. cinematic at its finest. . The possibilities of the film as a full-blown art form are exploited to spectacular advantage in almost every possible way before the film, unfortunately, begins a gradual slide into cliché, sensationalism, and melodramatic fall, as well as a real slowdown in the sheer virtuosity of cinema. But what a start !!
The part of the film that I am highlighting here is reserved for two very different modes of the saxophonist Gato Barbieri. Its title track is a temperamental, medium tempo ballad with all the hallmarks of Barbieri’s Latin fusion period, including Latin percussion, vibrators, and signature rattles, but when Paul and Jeanne leave the apartment and head to Paris, it explodes into the soundtrack. some wild free jazz from Ornette Coleman on piano (Barbieri was playing with Coleman’s soul mate Don Cherry at this time) – the perfect accompaniment to the scene’s half macho, half upbeat timbre.
The painter Francis Bacon once said, “Even in love, the barriers of the skin cannot be broken.” The point behind the masterstroke of using two portraits of Bacon, a man and a woman, to show the credits is that it can convey a message that is half aesthetic / half intellectual or one that is completely aesthetic only, depending on the sensitivity of the viewer. . He also talks about Bertolucci’s immersion in culture; Remember, we are in the early 1970s. I wonder if Bertolucci means that the man / woman in Bacon’s paintings corresponds directly in some way to the two main characters, or just in a more general sense. And seeing Jean-Pierre Leaud’s name in the credits, what more could a movie buff ask for?
Fade away: we see Paul standing under the elevated train tracks. The camera turns from behind him, to the right, as he clutches his head in his hands and yells profanity at the noise of the train passing above. He is a striking man in a long coat, almost orange in color; As his face dominates the screen for a second, we see Jeanne, an equally striking looking individual, softly focused, walking quickly behind him, catching up with him. His face has confused, pathetic, desperate, helpless and sad expressions. When he catches up to it and passes by, walking briskly, he stops to look at it for a brief moment. She is extravagant beyond the extravagant: a sensational head accessory, a long white coat, tall black boots. (The scene is in some respects possessed by costume designer Gitt Magrini.) As he walks past him, Bertolucci makes sure to include in the shot, on the far left, a very conservative couple in black coats walking side by side – a total contrast and comparison to Brando and Schneider, a juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular. And when she jumps on the sweeper’s broom on her way, we get our first real introduction to the spell cast by one of the greatest female presences in movie history.
She rushes forward, hurries, jumps over the broom and Bertolucci cuts to the street below where we see the policemen, alert, accessible and available, an ironic situation because it is the complete reverse of the circumstances at the end of the scene. movie where you can’t find a cop anywhere when Jeanne needs him so badly. More close-ups of Paul’s puzzled face follow and both the man and the woman look up at the apartment: she from outside the building where it is located, he still underneath the train tracks.
We wonder: who are these two? What is their relationship to each other? The questions are about to be answered and prolonged.
We get our first glimpse of Schneider as he gazes at the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign: what a superstar, maybe not equal to Brando in acting ability, but more so than him in screen presence and charisma (he will repeat this with Jack Nicholson for a few years later). He rushes down the stairs to a cafe to call his mother. Two other people are in the bathroom: an old woman brushing her false teeth (the meaning of which is …?) And Paul, meditating. The only way he could have gotten there before her is to have gone straight down while she went up to the lobby of the building to read the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign. At another time he will be in a place barely a shadow before her once again, we cannot know at the time, but while the camera remains on her in the phone booth, calling her mother, he gets the key to the apartment. from the concierge and enters.
This phone call gives us our first little exhibition: Jeanne tells her mother that she is going to look at an apartment and then to the station to meet Tom, presumably her boyfriend or husband. But the visual display is just as strong: she opens her coat, puts her hand on her hip, the camera pauses on her legs as she struts. Bertolucci’s message is clear and not feminist: this is a prepared woman.
The building’s concierge claims to ignore the rental apartment when Jeanne says, with great enthusiasm, “I’m here for the apartment.” The concierge says he doesn’t know about the sign and complains that people come and go and she is always the last to know. She tells Jeanne to go see the apartment herself if she wishes because she, the janitor, is (prophetically) afraid of rats. She can’t find the key; Jeanne turns in disgust to leave; the janitor pulls out a duplicate with a laugh, making an insulting comment about Jeanne’s youth. The janitor begins to sing and a hand reaches out to place an empty bottle outside an apartment door. The main theme song, a bit too schmaltzy here, is played on the soundtrack. Bertolucci throws a neat little signature move over the clang of the bottle, shifting focus from the janitor in the background to Jeanne in the foreground. But the whole scene is a cinema exercise: the camera starts backwards to the right and slowly moves inward at the window until the window is in the center. This is reminiscent of the first shot of the film that picked up Brando under the Metro tracks.
Jeanne ascends the apartment in the elevator in a shot that is lit in black and gray, in stark contrast to the starkness in which the scenes have been framed thus far.
Once inside the dark apartment, she opens the blinds and balcony doors and freaks out to see Paul sitting by the fireplace. She comments that he must have come in behind her when she walked in and left the door open, but he says no, he was already there. Almost instantly, they are talking about where the furniture should go. It moves around; In an overly obvious symbol or metaphor, or whatever you want to call it, its reflection is shown in a cracked mirror. This time the panoramic camera moves back, no closer, as she asks him, in English “What are you doing?” She, and we, are totally incapable of making sense of this man’s strange and dark behavior. Neither she nor we, the audience, know anything about him yet.
In a shot photographed in blue and white that clashes with everything else we’ve seen so far (as did the black and gray of the elevator shot), she goes to the bathroom and uses the toilet casually. She returns; the camera moves back to show his hat isolated on the ground; after she asks, “Are you still here?” he lifts her up in his arms.
Since sex scenes often appear in movies, this time it is exciting, disconnected, and disconcerting. Brute animal force is electrifying, but there are too many questions, for example, they have already been crossed twice, once on the street under the train tracks and then again in the cafe bathroom. They both look unforgettable, don’t you recognize each other in the apartment? They may, but choose not to comment. This would explain the spontaneous combustion somewhat.
I imagine what the feminist critics might have to say about all of this, especially the way her body shakes like a marionette after she rolls off it once they hit the ground, and the clear image of her sexuality that accompanies it. to this, not to mention that. Paul has exceeded his priapic antics. It is not my purpose to defend or criticize this here.
Interestingly, although Paul never takes his coat off during any of the meetings, when they leave the building we see him, through the glass of the front door, putting it on. That ?! When did you take it off? She wears a mischievous, almost mischievous smile, when they go out, she does not sin in any way, while Jeanne looks surprised, stunned, confused. He takes the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign, crumples it up, and throws it away: the lease is signed, the relationship has begun.
