How better to destroy an actor's vanity, how better to force us to admire him for himself and not because Stanley Kowalski looked sexy in a torn T-shirt? Did he eat as he did out of self-pity, because he felt he deserved to, because he felt deprived? But what a thing to happen to Marlon Brando. We see the wounded little boy - quite clearly, for example, in the monologue in "Last Tango" recalling his character's childhood. But such a narcissistic actor never held more love and grief for anybody else than he held for himself, and I say that not as an insult but as a way of explaining his power: In his best performances, he is sorry for himself.
These ideas exist in my mind, and it is wrong to place them in Brando's. Can this refer to his love-hate for Hollywood, for acting, for his own career, for the waste he was sometimes compelled to make of his talent? Is it himself that he'll never understand the truth about?
"I moved in for one night and stayed five years," he muses. So he was living off a woman who lived off whores. "It's kind of a dump, but not completely a flophouse," he says, but the film clearly shows it as a place where prostitutes bring their clients. His wife in "Last Tango in Paris" owned and ran a little hotel.
This was the greatest movie actor of his time, the author of performances that do honor to the cinema, and yet as Kauffmann notes, he was driven to disparage the profession of acting, which was the instrument of his genius. But here was a man who sometimes prostituted his own talent, who frustrated his admirers by seeming to scorn them, whose "eventual monstrous obesity seemed a clear sign of his hatred for Hollywood," as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the best of the Brando obituaries. I'm sure Bernardo Bertolucci, the film's director, did not have this in mind, and of course I cannot know what Brando was thinking. I watched it again, this time imagining that Brando was talking to his own dead body - that his anger and love, his blame and grief, were directed toward himself. He doesn't understand why she killed herself, why she abandoned him, why she never really loved him in the first place, why he was always more of a guest in her hotel than a husband in her bed.Īs I watched this scene, I was struck by a strange notion. He tries to wipe off her cosmetic death mask ("Look at you! You're a monument to your mother! You never wore makeup, never wore false eyelashes."). He calls her vile names, then is torn by sobs. "I may be able to comprehend the universe, but I'll never understand the truth about you," he says. The scene where he confronts the body of his wife, who has committed suicide, and mourns her in an outpouring of rage and grief. As I looked at the film yet again, Brando's most powerful scene resonated for me in an unexpected way. Who else can act so brutally and imply such vulnerability and need?" Tom arrives and leaves shortly, saying that they must start acting like adults, and he will find a better apartment.Reviewing "Last Tango in Paris" in 1972, I wrote that it was one of the great emotional experiences of our time, adding: "It's a movie that exists so resolutely on the level of emotion, indeed, that possibly only Marlon Brando, of all living actors, could have played its lead.
In tears, she calls her boyfriend and tells him that she’s found them an apartment. How does Last Tango in Paris end?Īfter the affair ends, Jeanne (Schneider) returns to the apartment to find that Paul(Brando) has moved out. Paul rapes her, if rape is not too strong a word to describe an act so casually accepted by the girl. It is a big, empty apartment, with a lot of sunlight but curiously little cheer. The movie begins when Jeanne, who is about to be married, goes apartment-hunting and finds Paul in one of the apartments. Why did Jeanne shoot Paul in Last Tango in Paris? More than a decade ago, Maria Schneider revealed the unsettling details surrounding an infamous rape scene in the 1972 drama “ Last Tango in Paris,” in which Marlon Brando’s character uses butter as a lubricant before forcing himself on her. What was the butter scene in Last Tango in Paris?