Review: Last Tango in Paris
By 1972, a revolution in moviemaking had taken hold and rewritten the rules. 1968 was the pivotal year, but it led to filmmakers around the world trying new ways to tell stories that felt more like the world the audience inhabited. As a result, Bernardo Bertolucci was emboldened to cross several screen taboos and tell a brutally honest story about relationships, loss, and yes, sex. People were stunned when his [[[Last Tango in Paris]]] opened that November.
Starring Marlon Brando, resurgent after [[[The Godfather]]]’s smash success, it was stunning for adults to see the great actor in a frank relationship complete with full-frontal nudity. But the story required someone of Brando’s age and stature to be compelling and for audiences to take the subject matter seriously. He plays Paul, an American living in Paris, whose wife has just committed suicide with no explanation. Stunned, he finds himself wandering to check out an apartment for rent, where he meets Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a young woman about to marry her filmmaker husband. As the two explore the empty rooms, they can’t deny the instantaneous attraction. And for someone as young and attractive as the unhappy Jeanne to find anything remotely interesting in Paul requires the raw animal magnetism that Brando displayed in most of his films to date.
