Tangoed for So ‘less’!
iView Author: Anubha Yadav (Delhi, India)
Email: anubhay1 [at] gmail [dot] com
This week skirted the two obvious extremes within cinema. Saw Bertolucci’s ‘Last Tango in Paris’, fashionably known called ‘art house’ cinema, a film many agree made Bertolucci find those two slippery mittens – ‘fame’ and ‘name’ in his illustrious career. And also caught the best of popular culture- 007 ie Quantum of Solace. Quantum of so(lace)Less! is not worth talking about.
The screenplay of the film could simply be-
M talks to Bond
Car chase
Bond kills a bad guy
M talks to Bond
Water chase
Bond kills another bad guy
M talks to Bond
Air chase
The End
No Bond ishtyle, no double entente’s, no plot, no easy brilliance, no ever enchanting Bond girl sequences. Quantum of SOless!
So I come to the other one, ‘Last Tango in Paris’, left me with very many questions. What many see as heightened aesthetics was coming out to be a male directors flight into the world of fulfilling his sexual fantasy. Avantegarde Cinema? Personal Film? or plain pornography? The Film’s inspiration was Bertolucci own sexual fantasy, in which Bertolucci wishes to have a unique relationship with a woman, a relationship in which there are no names, where identity takes a back seat as you rejoice in togetherness. What you create of/for each other, as you meet each other everyday is the only possible reality. Where the life you have led or your past is inconspicuously disposable.
Interesting premise. The problem is how Bertolucci goes about its visual exploration. Some questions that come to me are- Will this text remain the same if I remove Bertolucci from it? The answer will be a sure ‘NO’? I think in the garb of an esoteric visual exploration, it is a male serving, misogynist text, where what you finally remember is the sexually explicitness as if that was the only point of the film. As an emperical experiment purposely put forth the in/famous ‘butter sequence’ in the film for discussion with friends who have seen the film. The fact that they all remember the ‘butter sequence’ visually owing to its nature but do not remember most or all of what Marlon Brando says proves my point. ‘Cause isn’t the film as much in what Brando says there- But the fact that we only remember what he does is where the film defeats its purpose and falls from a high aesthetic discourse to a violative text that cheats its audience by choosing to subvert its editorial power through the choice of its visual narrative.
The other obvious problematic references are the use of the female body and male gaze.The appropriation of rape when it delicately supposes when it shows it as violent lust. The sanctity of the male body as to the female body for the film text/language. As you will remember, Brando is never without his clothes in abandon unlike Marie Schneider.
For those interested please read Marie Schneider’s interview(on Wikipedia), she makes a rather interesting comment on the ‘butter sequence’, the fact that it was not in the script and Brando and Bertollucci decided to shoot it impromptu!
I quote that excerpt from Marie’s Interview:
“I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that. Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.
She and Brando, however, remained friends until his death, though they never spoke of the movie “for a while”.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
‘Last Tango’ has all the whiffs and the foibles of the cinema of the 70s.It’s the era of the rise even mainstreaming of exploitation and the ‘X’ rating was a proudly sported badge. For ‘Sweet Sweetback’, Melvin Van Peebles filmed his barely of age son engaging in sex. Altman tricked a nude scene out of Sally Kellerman for MASH. Wes Craven unleashed his horrific snuff pic ‘Last House on the Left’ and Friedklin put lil Linda Blair through literal hell for Exorcist. It was the kind of decade that closed off with swansongs like ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. 70s was a time of intense provocation. Where rules, morals, ethics, boundaries all were put to test. Right/Wrong, Moral/Immoral, Legal/Illegal.. the decade has rightly gone down in history as the Golden Age of Cinema. That much is bonafide. The Rest is up for debate. Pretty much, what these cheeky provocateurs were looking for.
For starters Bertolucci has never been one of my 70’s favorites. Just find him and his movies way too overrated. And honestly i really did not find anything great about Last Tango in Paris. Problem with Bertolucci is he tends to be too self indulgent and just goes on and on in his flicks.
Me too all for 70’s exploitation. :-)
As for the after/side-effects, well, that’s for those film school lectures.
Anubha – very well written piece and I agree with all your points. When I saw Last Tango, what made me deeply uncomfortable was that Schneider’s tears didn’t seem eroticized or sexual, but were tears of genuine humiliation and discomfort. So I guess I’m not surprised to read what Schneider said in her interview.
It seemed such a lopsided fantasy, where the woman was merely an embodiment of the male protagonist’s desires without viewers having an access to her own mind.
And with all said and done – if not for names like Brando and Bertolucci, this is basically a syrupy tale of an unattractive over the hill man with pretensions to machismo living out his fantasies. Meh, I’d rather watch real porn.
Sid
Changing morality with changing cultural norms i suppose is valid for all cinema,that precisely is the function of an art form, perhaps can reluctantly agree with you that he is trying to disengage from what is seen as moral/right etc…..but as I SAY that one needs to ponder on can their be an absolute version? And if the answer is NO then personal morality/s, use of power to perpetuate and abuse it is worth considering.
Dewi
I absolutely agree with you!