He finds Jeanne, (Maria Schneider), a girl-woman, barely out of her teens, looking at the same apartment. Overwhelmed with grief, Paul walks the streets and finds himself looking at an apartment for rent. She did bequeath the hotel, and it’s seedy occupants, to Paul. She didn’t leave much else - no good-bye note or explanation for her husband, parents or lover, a guest in the fleabag hotel she owned and managed. His French wife, Rosa, had slit her veins, leaving bloody bath water and spattered walls behind. Marlon Brando delivers one of his characteristically idiosyncratic performances as Paul, a middle-aged American in “emotional exile” who comes to Paris where his estranged wife has committed suicide. Bacon is best known for his tortured figures that evoke feelings of existential despair, and this is the dominant mood of Last Tango as well.
It made such an impression on them that it changed their entire conception of how the film would work. While they were in Paris ready to begin shooting of the film, Bertolucci and Marlon Brando, the film’s star, saw a show of Bacon’s images. In fact, Bertolucci went so far as to base Last Tango on the work of Francis Bacon, widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. The Francis Bacon paintings that haunt the opening credits are the first hint that life might be both tortuous and beautiful in Bertolucci’s unforgettable portrait of grief and anonymous sex in 1970s Paris. Last Tango in Paris is one of the great explorations of cinema’s visual possibilities. Paul (Marlon Brando) meets Jeanne (Maria Schneider) From the moment of the film’s debut and Pauline Kael’s enthusiastic defense of the film, notarized by Roger Ebert as the most famous film review ever published, the camps were divided – was the film pornography masquerading as art, or was it an emotionally raw exploration of human behavior at its animal base? To this day, for many it is difficult to choose but one thing is certain, regardless of what side you eventually choose Last Tango in Paris will force you to react to it – you will not be able to sit idly by. Director : Bernardo Bertolucci/ France/English/129 mtsįew films in the history of cinema have created such a divide in the art world or garnered as much controversy as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris did in 1972.