Reacting and Eluding

"Well. I liked his acting in this--and I didn't like it in The Godfather, said a lady wearing a blue silk scarf.

"What did you think, dear?" a man asked his wife. She said (from under her furs), "Oh some parts were marvelous but some were positively awful."

"No no. It's a masterpiece. Simply a masterpiece. What did you think, son?"

The well-dressed New York audience leaving the Sunday matinee performance of Last Tango in Paris had emerged trying to hide the impact of the film behind the trivial concerns of an entertainment mentality. Was the film "good?" Did you like Brando's acting? Isn't Bertolucci a marvelous director? Was it, heh-heh, too explicit for you? Then, talk of what to do this evening, where to go next week -- a rapid shift of the attention that left no time for emotions to sink in. Escaping down 59th Street to Central Park, re-running the film in our minds, two of us followed a silent, twisted path around boulders and leafless trees. The fog joined nearby buildings into solid walls; the isolation, the desolation, were nearly as great as the initial feelings engendered by the film.

None of Bernardo Bertolucci's previous films could so stir the psyche. Those works -- including one or two masterpieces -- were, as everyone said, lush and lyrical. They were emotive but they established an aesthetic distance that made them much less immediate than Last Tango.

The Spider's Stratagem, for example, has a serene mystery to it -- perhaps emanating from the film's roots in a Borges story -- that will not allow deep penetration into the viewers' lives. The film explores psychological questions, but does so mainly to raise broader questions about heroism and martyrdom and the impact of truth on history.

In The Conformist, Bertolucci explored the personal life of a fascist, flirting with psycho-history. But his film argues the connection between sexual repression and fascism even less clearly than the novel by Alberto Moravia on which it was based. So the psychology of the characters become subordinate to the suspense and aesthetic ebullience which carried the film.

But for Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci abandoned adaptation and, on the surface, politics in favor of pure psychological portraiture on a personal, microcosmic level. What threatens the audience's complacency is such intensity on such a personal level. The audience dilutes the passions of the film by thinking of it only in terms of one more weekend's entertaining diversion. People can ignore the film in the same way that people who watch television news can ignore a war.

I saw the film again the same evening, and on second viewing it was -- like any complex film -- even more alive, more intense, more involving. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider lead compressed lives -- lives that burn out almost in an instant. Brando's scream in the film's brilliant opening scene declares an existential wound -- later filled, if only for an instant, by Brando and Schneider's sudden and passionate coming together. During their short-lived ecstasy, Brando declares that "everything outside of this place is bullshit."

The phrase rings of Erich Fromm's description of the orgiastic union: "the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it." The ecstasy -- in Fromm as in the film--is always ephemeral. The public that filled Time's letter columns and opposed the film on moral grounds also bought many millions of copies of Fromm's Art of Loving, and made his ideas popular wisdom. In showing the orgiastic tryst as an ultimate failure, the film plays out a moral well within that wisdom. The departure from bourgeois morality lies in the deeper implication that the characters' ecstasy is the fleeting and only hope in a desparate world where women demand that their men be fortresses of strength and men seek protection in a fortress that is their own dominance over female flesh. (Those who decry the film as sexist fail to recognize that the film stylizes and includes all the degeneracies of society, sexism included.)

Yet some of Bertolucci's characteristic romantic ambivalence toward modern life shines through. Paris in rich golds and browns is even more pleasing than it was in The Conformist. In the final phase of the film, even this romance breaks down, as Brando walks past wrecked buildings and muttering peep shows. Still, the film has such a fluid pictorial style that it often seems to visually glorify all eroticism, no matter how painful. If the world is dying, it is doing so in a grand and passionate manner where even the greatest decadence is romanticized by hyperbole.

The best indicator or Bertolucci's romantic ambivalence has always been his aesthete's love of the dance and the opera. The finest scenes in Before the Revolution took place at the opera; dance scenes of some sort have been prominent in most of his films. But nowhere except in Last Tango in Paris has the dance had such clear import. The tango at the end of the film is not just another Bertolucci dance -- it is a masterstroke. The tango, originally a spirited, emotional flamenco dance, is shown not just as the diluted ballroom style it is today, but as a lifeless, pitiful dance hearkening back to the thirties, suggesting that life has not come so far from world-wide depression as we might like to believe.

Bertolucci and his film have already been much abused. He was subjected to a difficult obscenity trial in Italy. The film has been bandied about as sensational, been labeled both a sex film and a cult film, all with the result that many people try not even to show an interest in it or, worse yet, see a lurid sensationalism not actually present.

But no matter how many people categorize the film incorrectly on the basis of promotion, it will still reach a much larger audience than it would have otherwise, and the clearest audience reaction will not be disgust or lust or even deep emotional involvement but rather the lack of impact that comes from viewing it only as a diversion. As a truly radical film, Last Tango in Paris is so far from the popular mind that it can have only subtle, nearly unconscious cultural influence, but it will influence other film makers, and Bertolucci, still a very young man, will make more films. Perhaps these later films will reach a public prepared by this film, less complacent and more receptive.

"Next time I say we see The Sound of Music."

Last Tango in Paris comes to Boston on April 11.