One Paragraph Movie Review: Last Tango in Paris

Three hundred and seventeenth film: Last Tango In Paris, the notorious Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider film that is transparently trying to be one thing and ends up being resoundingly another. Writer/director Bertolucci is trying to make a middle-aged fantasy look a bit artsy — an older man encounters a younger woman at an apartment inspection and they use the apartment exclusively for sex without attachments or emotional intimacy, which of course never works and doesn’t work here. He’s recently widowed by suicide, too traumatised and world-weary, and she’s too idealistic and, as a character, unrealistic. There is absolutely nothing in this relationship for her, and smacking of Tarantino’s foot fetish, the whole thing reeks of a misogynistic toddler making a movie about a type of woman who doesn’t exist. She’s much younger, she has no say in how the relationship proceeds, her genitals are on film often, his never, she’s controlled, abused and raped but keeps coming back for more, he’s paunchy, rambling, and uninteresting and she falls in love with him anyway. Chucking in a shovelled-on artsy motif involving frosted glass, windows, and mirrors does nothing but lend a veneer of art school over an improbable bucket of dumb muck. Plus saxophone. It might be an insensitive observation under the circumstances, but what an arsehole. One quarter of a symbolic fireside armchair out of five.