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Last Tango In Paris [1973] | ![Last Tango In Paris [1973]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71WBABBHGNL._SL160_.gif)
 enlarge | Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Actors: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Maria Michi, Giovanna Galletti, Gitt Magrini
Studio: MGM Entertainment
Category: DVD
List Price: £15.99
Buy New: £3.25
You Save: £12.74 (80%)
New (19) Used (9) from £2.49
Rating:  13 reviews
Format: Dubbed, Pal, Widescreen
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Region: 2
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 124 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5050070001822
ASIN: B00004RJG3
Theatrical Release Date: February 7, 1973
Release Date: April 24, 2000
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
Fantastic soundtrack,shame about the film March 6, 2008
Franz Bieberkopf (Liverpool,GB)
Bertolucci's 1973 film created the most amazing furore on release,largely due to it's(for the time)sexual frankness.Anyone who has watched modern porn will wonder what the fuss was about.
It's a film about a US expat(Brando),recently widowed,who hooks up with a younger woman(Schneider)for a no-strings sex-only relationship.The rest of the film charts this relationship to it's end.Schneider naked certainly has her charms,the same can't be said about Brando,surely the most overrated actor ever.
It seems that Bertolucci,while planning LTIP,originally planned for the story to be about a homosexual relationship(Jean-Paul Trintignant had agreed to appear in it)-that would really have blown the minds of the audiences of the early 1970s!!It would probably have been a better film than this as well.
The photograpy is excellent(what else do you expect from a Bertolucci film?)but the soundtrack is simply the best I've ever heard in any film.Composed and performed by the Argentinian jazzman Gato Barbieri,it has to be heard to be believed,it is wonderful.
You could buy the soundtrack on CD,but watch the film to see how the music complements the film-then go and buy the CD!!
Where Sex acts as a refuge December 24, 2007
Jay (Mauritius)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It was, in short, a film about sex and the way that human beings use sex as a refuge, a release, and a weapon... The frank dialog, the nudity, and the simulated sex were not gratuitously employed but were integral to the theme of the film, and if the picture was not totally successful, it was certainly unforgettable...
Marlon Brando appears as a middle-aged American--but not the kind of American in Paris glorified by either George Gershwin or Ernest Hemingway... This is a man tormented by inner conflict... Brando's Paul between self-hatred over his wife's suicide and his feelings for Maria Schneider's Jeanne, she between her adoring documentary filmmaker fiancé (based wittily on Godard) and the taboo-breaking Paul...
The stark, empty flat that is the lovers' retreat from conventional society, and the cold, windy pavement where Paul screams his loathing for the world against the din of a passing train--connects us with the mood of the film...
Eager to escape the oppressive walls of his dark life, Paul embarks on a very complete sexual experience with a willing young woman in which there is no history spoken, no promises of future liaisons, no ties of any kind with the outside...
The two lovers know nothing of each other, not even their names... Their affair is purely physical, and the barren apartment becomes, as Bertolucci intended, a world of debauchery on which is explored a catalog of behavior that seems more childish than kinky...
Jeanne is a child-woman... She asks what she should call Paul, and they proceed to give themselves names brought only out of grunts, growls and screeches... Paul's cruelty is not justified and perhaps this is what attracts the modish girl... Some scenes emotionally are so provocative that you experience a wide range of feelings... Paul never asks Jeanne a direct question, but is constantly framing her for his next experiment, besides he assaults her, humiliates her and pushes her over the edge... There is one great moment for the heroine when she refuses Paul's power play and is equally unimpressed by his new declarations of love... She insists: 'It's over!'
The film is beautifully shot... The cinematography is unique, somber, shadowy and painterly... It presents despair, and the music reinforce the despairing mood... The movie is also intensely erotic, intensely realistic, immensely disturbing... The extreme frankness makes faintly uncomfortable viewing, not only because of its sexual material but because of its exploration of our inner nature with true perspective... Hopefully, younger viewers can turn their minds back to a time when sex was mysterious and beautiful; dangerous and daring; not just easy and transitory... Sex nearly always implies intimacy, but doesn't always provide it...
'Last Tango in Paris' is one of the great explorations of cinema's visual possibilities... Bertolucci camera's movements throughout the film characterize the rights steps of the tango which the two main characters execute at the climax of the film... We feel swept away by the beauty of the tango despite the tragic quality of the acts and events it escorts... T
 Astonishing November 15, 2007
Brendan O. Clarke (Edinburgh)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Brendan Clarke ha scriotta: There's a lot wrong with this movie, but the core of the plot is not without interest. The main characters test each others love to the max. Timing of their actions also comes into play, and has a great deal to do with the outcome of these lovers' fates. I see what the director/writer was trying to do, and if Brando had been controlled a bit more, the film wouldn't have come off as being a bit silly in so many scenes. A case in point are the the infamous "butter" and the "pig" scenes.
Now that sex/porn is pretty much in the open in main stream cinema, i am not shocked by this movie. Marlon Brando was a great actor, and as usual, his performance here was an emotionally intense one. I didn't realise how comical and hilarious Brando could be until watching this movie. Despite the gloom, and dark (or orange tone!) of the film, I managed a chuckle and a good laugh from his dialogue. One major fault was Maria Schneider's character was not more developed.
It just seems "Paul" and her geeky boyfriend (and Bertolucci) used her as nothing but an object. I wanted to know more about her character and what the deal was with her deceased father and whether Paul putting on her father's uniform hat triggered some sort of rage within. Did he sexually abuse her? Was their relationship incestuous?
The end let me down because I wanted both characters to fall in love and live happily ever after...but in this demented, even morbid Bertolucci flick that wasn't gonna happen!
Stunning performance by Brando June 10, 2007
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
On the cover of the paperback edition of my novel A Perfectly Natural Act there is the blurb: "As compelling as Last Tango in Paris!" (This is not a shameless plug since my novel is long out of print.) When your work is touted as being "like" some earlier, successful work, you can be sure what is really being said is your work is not all that good and needs some hype to move it off the shelves.
So it took me 33 years to finally get around to watching "Last Tango..." and that is all to the good because if I had watched it when I was young, the barbarous sexuality would have sorely distracted me. Well, Maria Schneider (Jeanne) would have. She is very sexy and is shown complete ("she comes complete"!) in a number of scenes. Her acting ability has been challenged by some, but I thought she did a nice job in a difficult role.
Problem was she was paired opposite Marlon Brando (Paul) who was busy giving one of his greatest performances. Brando said some time afterwards that he never wanted to do anything like this again. Presumably he was referring to the depressing nature of human sexuality portrayed in the film. This is ironic since most of the raunchy and degrading lines are spoken by Brando who improvised them himself! He later commented that some of the lines written by director Bernado Bertolucci were not to his liking. What I think happened is Bertolucci wanted to live out as a director one of his youthful fantasies (raw, anonymous sex with a young beauty) and Brando, with his ultra sophistication about such matters, played his part with a brutal satirical edge, perhaps making fun of Bertolucci's fantasy, turning it into an unpleasant, hard reality.
But the "reality" was a bit over the top for everybody. The infamous "Get the butter" scene, which was improvised by Brando and Bertolucci (to Schneider's dismay), made it clear that Paul considered Jeanne an animal that you used and nothing more. The dead rat scene and all the pig talk, ditto. Brando was also projecting his own feelings. He was 48-years-old when the film was released and was getting a paunch and losing his muscle tone. All the sex scenes but one are filmed with Brando clothed so as not to make the decline of his physical prowess obvious. He projected his own feelings about the decline of his body by referring derisively to his hemorrhoids, his prostate, and his paunch.
What Brando does so very well here is become that animalistic, but thinking brute who has his way with women because they cannot resist his alpha male prowess regardless of the gray in his hair. The early scene in the apartment when the nameless Brando just takes the nameless Schneider without so much as a spoken word or a caress might make women say "if only more men could be so commanding," and men say "I wish I had that kind of confidence." I am reminded Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) except that here little is left to the imagination. The Brando that was Kowalski at twenty-seven (with an I.Q. upgrade) could easily be the Brando that was Paul at forty-eight.
Almost all the discussion about this movie is about Brando, and that is certainly understandable since, despite all the ugliness of the film, it featured one of Brando's greatest performances. However, the movie was and is Bertolucci's. He wrote it and directed it. His original cut runs something like four hours. The version here rated NC-17 runs 136 minutes. The problem is that just about everything in the movie that does not included Brando is a bit of an anticlimax or an irrelevancy. Jean-Pierre Leaud (Tom) of Truffaut's The Four Hundred Blows (1959) fame plays a film maker and Jeanne's intended. He was possibly chosen for the film because his boyish style and demeanor would contrast so sharply with Brando's commanding style. Two lovers had Jeanne: one was easy and boring, the other was scary and exciting. But I think Bertolucci was also having some fun with the French cinema and especially with Francois Truffaut. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that a year later Truffaut would release Day for Night (1973) (La Nuit americaine) in which Truffaut plays a director directing Leaud in a kind of pleasing but lightweight film contrasting sharply with the dark psychosis of Last Tango.
I don't think I could sit through the four hour version but it might be a good learning experience for young film makers. At any rate, perhaps some of the seeming illogic of the film might become reasonable, including the all too easy and not entirely explicable ending. I rate this film very highly because it was innovative (rather shocking for its time), with a fine jazz score, but mostly because of Brando's stellar performance and the sensual beauty of a 20-year-old Maria Schneider. By the way, the film is in French and English with subtitles. Brando's French is amusing, and whoever dubbed Schneider's English has a cute and witty voice.
Another excellent (and very beautiful) film by Bertolucci is The Conformist (1970) starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, and Dominque Sanda. Interestingly enough Sanda was originally picked for Last Tango, as was Trintignant, and she would have given some needed depth to Jeanne's character, but she declined I guess because of all the nudity. Ironically a few years later Schneider was tabbed to play the lead in Luis Brunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) but dropped out during the filming reportedly because of a nude scene! Maybe she was afraid of becoming typecast.
I guess the bottom line on Last Tango is that it is an uncomfortable film illuminated by a veracious Parisian feel and a truly stunning performance by one of the greatest actors to ever grace the silver screen.
Brando's way May 29, 2007
jimbob (Australia)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A beautiful and challenging film. Bertolucci's direction is fluid, Storraro's camera/lighting is expressive, Brando's acting is done with conviction, and it all works to tell a moving tale of death, rebirth,and a sort of acceptance of mortality.
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