'The Last Tango in Paris': a review

This is a review of director Bernardo Bertolucci's 1982 erotic drama film 'Last Tango in Paris' starring Marlon Brando.

For those who have not seen this great film by the great Bernardo Bertolucci, I’ll keep this review as simple as possible without spoiling it.

The Last Tango in Paris is centered around a middle-aged widower named Paul (Marlon Brando) who enters into an impersonal no-names-no-questions relationship with a Parisian woman 20-something years younger than himself. Their relationship is built around a series of extremely intense, kinky, and ultimately empty sexual encounters in an old apartment building. The film uses the intimate act of sex in its purest sense as a way to show the disconnect between these 2 characters—one, who struggles to deal with the suicide of his wife and the other, torn between her love for him and another guy.

This is a beautiful movie with atmosphere so thick you can cut it with a knife. The look of this movie makes you want to fly to Paris immediately. The color palette is deep and saturated. The cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Conformist, The Last Emperor) is terrific. The soundtrack theme by Gato Barbieri is sexy and consistent throughout. The intro credits open up with 2 paintings by Francis Bacon: Double Portrait of Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach and Study for a Portrait, both of which seem to suggest, by their violently distorted—almost lewd—facial and body expressions metaphors of the characters and relationships in the film.

As beautiful as this film is as poetry and as affecting as it is emotionally, especially the scene where Brando confronts his dead wife’s corpse, I must warn those of you who have a problem with sex, because it gets extremely raunchy in this movie. When this film was initially released, the MPAA gave it an X rating and after revisions were made it still couldn’t get any cleaner than an NC-17 rating. But this is a European film and as any film connoisseur can tell you there’s a big difference between what America deems unfit and what the rest of the world thinks.

When most of us think of Brando we think of the Godfather, Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar, or Kurtz, the megalomaniac in Apocalypse Now. Tango is one of Brando’s lesser known films except among those whose movie tastes extend beyond our shores. Brando is the greatest actor who ever lived because he never seems like he is acting if that makes sense. There is such a raw, physical, yet visceral power about his performances that makes him seem opaque while at the same time transparent and vulnerable. Another actor who came across like this was James Dean. The fact that sex is so big in this film can obscure the deeper meaning behind its necessity by his character to shield himself with it, to keep his heart—still wounded over the loss of his wife—from being wounded again. Great, great film. See this one with a like-minded movie lover and remember the Merlot while you’re at it.