Last and also Least

...later, Paul insults her as "Miss Blowjob of 1933 she still makes a few scores when she takes her teeth out...

...But why a man of such varied talents and accomplishments should end up as his wife's gigolo is made no more clear than why she performed that particularly gory razor-slashing on herself, which turned their entire bathroom into a bloodbath...

...indoors, however, especially in the sex scenes, there is a riot of yellows, golds and oranges worthy only of a fashion magazine editor's idea of heaven...

...remotely based on a Borges story, and praised as the director's best work by numerous reviewers who may have wanted to steal Pauline Kael's thunder...

...Then I want you to go behind and swallow the farts of the dying pig...

...And so with the dialogue...

...There are no real characters here, only movable pegs on which to hang a makeshift plot and shiftless actors' improvisations...

...He rapes and sodomizes her, at the same time forcing her to repeat blasphemous and antisocial phrases...

...she gives him one last masturbation under the table, calmly wipes herself off, and prepares to leave forever...

...A fancy apartment like that in Passy would be guarded with machine guns against casual copulators off the street, and the rent would be way beyond a flophouse-owner's means...

...Almost everything about the film is a lie...

...Or is it just an indulgence in some of the filmmakers' not so secret problems...

...The colors provided by Vittorio Storaro's cinematography are nice when they are evoking rainy or cloudy cityscapes in grays, browns and violets...

...The better to stick it in your rear...

...When Paul frightens Jeanne by making as if to devour a dead rat, he assures her "I'll save the arsehole for you...

...Despite statements to the contrary, the film has been tampered with cut in several places, and the big anti-God scene, in which Brando, impersonating a mad dog, growlingly attacks a Bible salesman, was eliminated entirely...

...Or he neglects her until she is driven to masturbation, or, again, he has her sodomize him with two ringers while he extracts from her declarations of abject enslavement...

...When I asked Borges about it, he said that was the first he had heard of such a movie...

...The worst degradation in the film is Jeanne's...

...When the film was first shown on the closing night of the last New York Film Festival, without the customary critics' screening preceding it, all but the most important reviewers were kept in doubt whether they would get to see that sold-out event at all...

...If you ask me, everyone involved in this Tango deserves the tripe in his face...

...This was The Spider's Stratagem...

...We, however, see bits of their outside lives during the three days the film spans...

...Paul also keeps vigil by Rosa's corpse laid out in a bed of flowers, and is consumed with recriminations, rage and, finally, grief...

...And why should he be proposing love and marriage at a time when bitterness about his wife and matrimony fills him entirely...

...This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made," and maybe also "the most liberating movie ever...

...pants the sodomizing girl in a transport of self-abasement...

...In due time, her review, reproduced by United Artists in its entirety in 14-point type, became a two-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times...

...or, like Molly Haskell, that it "does as much perhaps morefor the woman as for the man...

...It seems to be muttering something about the need to grow up and abandon childish notions of sexual paradises, yet those are the only things it droolingly revels in...

...Nevertheless, passion-beclouded female critics, gushing over Brando, Bertolucci or both, declare, like Pauline Kael, that the film is "the most liberating ever...

...What a big tongue...

...Lesser parts offer their interpreters nothing...

...A young American woman who had a bit part in Bertolucci's Conformist claims to have worked on this screenplay...

...A handsome young Negress at Paul's hotel is glimpsed being rejected by her saxophone-playing lover as she greedily tries to go down on him...

...On the morning after her mysterious suicide, he finds himself inspecting an elegant but dilapidated apartment in Passy simultaneously with another prospective tenant, Jeanne, a frizzy-haired, miniskirted swinger of 20...

...There followed a Time cover story on the film and its star, Marlon Brando, and promptly the advance ticket sale zoomed...

...Maria Schneider's Jeanne is a buxom guttersnipe, with the face of a perverted cow and the acting ability of a petulant ox...

...Paul defies a woman tango contest judge by baring his bottom at her and shouting, "Kiss me, sweetheart...

...And why did Paul so love the lewd creature she was, owning diversified orgy equipment ranging from French ticklers to clerical collars...

...when, at one point, she quotes Pirandello ("Tonight we improvise...

...Most idiosyncratically, he informs Jeanne that you don't find the ideal man "until you go right up in the arse of death, right into the womb of fear," a remark redolent equally with pederasty, pretentiousness and meaninglessness...

...What long nails...

...The characters make even less sense...

...He gives us a star turn in French and English, an anthology of all his best parts or, rather, highlights from them...

...Will you do that for me...

...The better to let your crabs hide in...

...suddenly, he reappears and drags her into a restaurant where a tango competition is in progress...

...badiy done, should be thrown in the face of the cook...

...And what about Tom, the infantile cineaste who recites litanies of movie stars' names in the pouring rain and is continually framing imaginary shots with his bare knuckles why should this parody of a Godardian suddenly grow up in the end, turn down the overlush Passy apartment now proposed to him by Jeanne, and come out in defense of maturely facing reality...

...The music by Gato Bar-bieri, a saxophonist, is soupy ersatz Nino Rota, and the production design is on the schmaltzy side...

...While he lies crumpled and dead on her balcony, she rehearses her line to the police: self-defense against an unknown rapist...

...Then there is Brando...

...Jean-Pierre Leaud's Tom is his usual home-movies notion of camping it up...

...Just before it was released, an earlier Bertolucci item opened in the hope of cashing in on Tango...

...Earlier, Jeanne explored Paul's body: "What strong arms you have...

...Who indeed wrote what script there is...

...At a later screening, so help me, 1 heard this line as "The better to tickle your lid, my dear...

...She and Tom have a number of fights, and Jeanne now thinks she is in love with Paul...

...Bertolucci and one Franco Arcalli are listed as coauthors, but Arcalli is the film's editor and cutters have not been known as writers...

...Jeanne crouches during a longish scene with her half-pulled-down pants emphasizing rear cleavage...

...Jeanne's mother is a hypocrite, her favorite schoolteacher was a lesbian, her trusty maid is an arrant racist...

...Paul pulls her onto the dance floor where they perform an obscene travesty of the tango and are chased away...

...Jean-Pierre Leaud's wild, infantile improvisations as Tom are barely warmed-over God-ard...

...Paul has seedy encounters with Rosa's mother, who has come up for the funeral, and Marcel, Rosa's lover, who also lives in their hotel and wears the identical robe Paul wearsboth gifts from Rosa...

...the French dialogue is credited to Agnes Varda...

...It appears to make fun of Tom's inferior loving through his camera as against Paul's superior lovemaking with his masterful penis, yet ends by vindicating Tom above the broken, sodden, aging suitor of our overgrown teeny-bopper...

...When Paul gratuitously beats up a John brought to his hotel door by a prostitute, he derisively calls him "Faggot...

...Our heroine first betrays her fiance, then becomes a masochistic sex object and, finally, murders her lover...

...Is this supposed to be a clue to our protagonist's secret problem...

...And Jeanne's apartment, with its lushly leather-bound books, is hardly what this goose would inhabit...

...It was further impressed on them by United Artists, the distributor, that Italian censorship would very likely ban or mutilate the film, and that unless New York critical support swayed or shamed the censors, no other audience in America, or possibly anywhere, would ever see it...

...They did, finally, sitting on steps and in the aisles...

...Last Tango in Paris strikes me as yet another pretentious, empty and dishonest film by that arrogant, attitudinizing, derivative, monstrously slick filmmaker, Bernardo Bertoluc-ci...

...With its $5 tariff, Tango took its rightful place alongside The Godfather and Deep Throat, while more articles on it kept coming out, jointly constituting a universal rave pre-review...

...charmingly, he informs her that "in ten years [she] will be playing soccer with [her] teats...

...It purports to mock Tom with his fantasies of nonstop tracking shots, yet is itself full of the likes of them...

...Their conversation is mostly taunts and parries...

...The better to squeeze a fart out of you...

...It is not so much that the film is vulgar, though it certainly is, as that it is mindless and pointless...

...Gratuitious arse shots proliferate...

...But most homosexual, perhaps, is the scene in which Paul and Marcel, the men who shared Rosa, sit on the lover's bed and exchange beauty secrets about how to keep their hairlines and waistlines looking young just the sort of thing aging inverts would prattle about...

...to her and the world...

...There is a line in The Spider's Stratagem: "Tripe is a dish that, well done, is very good...

...Its climax is to be their wedding, but, before that, there are recapitulations of her childhood as a reactionary colonel's daughter...

...Bertolucci's camera skitters about with considerable chic and relentless ostentation...

...Grandest of these was Pauline Kael's, which proclaimed the date the equivalent in movie history of the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite o) Spring...

...In her parents' place, things remain preposterously as they were when she was eight: The notebook she secretly kept is still under the table where she hid to write in it...

...The film altogether wallows in anal references (and if not anal, the next best thing, fecal) dragged in for no reasons germane to the characters as portrayed...

...Jeanne meets Tom, her fiance, a TV filmmaker and movie nut, who is shooting a documentary about a typical Paris girl jeanne...

...the inconsistency becomes absurd...

...What thick hair...

...It is poseur's cinema at its worst, all stillborn symbols, pseudoprofound surrealism and inscrutability, except for an eminently scrutable homosexual sensibility: almost every shot arbitrarily, estheticizingly posed, and the entire film one long pseudo intellectual pose...

...In the apartment, the lovers play sexual games, more often than not sadomasochistic...

...Whoever wrote what, hatred for women and a pervasive homosexual sensibility characterize the film, which purports to be the last word in heterosexual explicitness and so delights womeneven Women's-Libreviewers...

...The dead wife was a super-bitch, her mother is a pious fool, the Passy concierge a cackling madwoman...

...Tango is much less obscure, but just about as posturing a film...

...At other times, he reminisces about his unhappy childhood, or has her relate details of her sexual awakening...

...He pursues her into her apartment where she finally tells him her name even as she shoots him with her father's gun...

...Paul rents the apartment, furnishes it with a large mattress and a few incidentals, and the pair propose to meet here for purposes of pure sex, without exchanging names or biographies...

...She, like Rosa, is called by Paul every vile name in the book ("pig-fucker" and "fucking pig" are special favorites Any connection with Pigpen, a similarly oriented film by Pasolini, whose assistant Bertolucci once was...

...Paul is a thinly veiled Marlon Brando, who obviously improvised his approximate life story for the autobiographical speeches...

...A bunch of kids are shown defecating...

...Already behind the film's opening titles we saw paintings by Francis Bacon, a painter with a markedly homosexual orientation...

...Within a few minutes, the two are copulating (she wears no panties), first standing up, then on the floor...

...And why should Jeanne have instant intercourse with a shabby, middle-aged stranger with whom she has exchanged only a handful of surly words, then promptly set up bawdy housekeeping with him...

...And, significantly, Paul's dying gesture is sticking his wad of chewing gum on the underside of Jeanne's balcony railing An "Up yours...

...I want the pig to vomit in your face and you to swallow the vomit...

...The brutish Kowalski, the fallen British gentleman from Burn!, the victimized rebel from The Wild One, the dogged Chicano of One-Eyed Jacks, turn up at random and get into one another's hair...

...The actor goes from exaggerated toughness to undue whininess without ever defining Paul's psychic or cultural identity...

...The film was first intended for Trinti-gnant and Dominique Sanda, who would have turned it into a very different story, but Bertolucci evidently couldn't care less...

...This has two unfortunate results: We have seen it all before and it does not hang together...

...Paul vanishes for a while and Jeanne cools toward him...

...A movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies," she swooned on and on...

...Certainly the kind of sex between strangers hurtled into by Paul and Jeanne is much more frequent among homosexuals, as also would be anal rape...

...That fine actor Massimo Girotti is a bit overrefined as Marcei, and neither he nor Maria Michi, as Rosa's mother, is helped by being dubbed into French by an over-smooth voice...

...He declares his love and proposes marriage, but now she finds him old, drunk and emotionally demanding...

...All this, of course, is detrimental only in a film posturing as the revelation of ultimate heterosexual truths, and made by two such super masculine men: Brando, the heartthrob of even the most ardent feminists, and Bertolucci, about whose alleged female conquests Time magazine is still deliciously hinting away...

...and, parallelly, in the insulting and humiliating of women...

...Yes, and more...

...He rejects nonsexual feelings, roars when she asks for his name, and preconizes animal noises...

...For example, while Paul has himself buggered by Jeanne, he rants: "I want to get a pig and have it fuck you...

...Take the locations, to begin with...

...The better to scratch your arse with...

...Tom somehow reclaims Jeanne's affection we don't know exactly how, but comprehensible acts are few and far between in this long film...

...Everything outside this place is bullshit," Paul declares...

...Clearly, she falls in love with Paul for mere purposes of dramatic irony, so that when he falls for her, she may fall out of love and reject him...

...Paul, a 45-year-old American expatriate, has been kept for the last five years by his French wife, Rosa, who runs a cheap hotel...

...Brando's ad libs are inartistic and often boring, as actors' improvisations in wholesale quantities always are compared to real writing...

...Critics went home breathless to write their condign raves...

...Women appear consistently as cold, mean, dishonest, mad creatures...

...Another time he tells her that slaves are branded on the arse, in allusion, perhaps, to Story of O. A couple of times he dwells incongruously on his hemorrhoids...