Bernardo Bertolucci: the eternal tango



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The music was extinct for a long time, but the tango never stopped. This is the movie that followed Bernardo Bertolucci on his grave. Must follow. A gigantic movie. And a gigantic pile of unpaid guilt. At first was the utopia of absolute freedom, in the end the most brutal form of oppression: the making available to the woman by a man.

The Marxist Bertolucci wanted in 1972 to create a space with the "last tango of Paris", which should be free from all social conventions and repressions. In his previous films, such as the militant education novel "Vor dem Revolution" (1964) or the drama "The Big Mistake" about a follower of fascism in 1970, he spoke very concretely about overthrow and repression. "The last tango of Paris", when Bertolucci had turned just 31 years old, should now be extremely abstract. And at the same time extremely sensual.

The screenplay: an almost faceless, elderly American woman and a French girl with almost no history who dribbles drunk between couples of tango dancers on the dance floor and offers herself a noisy attic leading to the Eros. It is the breaking of conventions, the destruction of power structures. The American is played by superstar Marlon Brando, aged 48, and the French by unknown actress Maria Schneider, aged 19. This is unfortunately already a power deficit that confirms rather than destroying structures to conquer.

Then the scene with the butter: the American dominates the French, lubricates her anus with a mother of breakfast, rapes her while he inflates her and makes Marxist maxims on bourgeois family structures and lies capitalists. Apparently, the film's idea to a Bertolucci dream of having arisen, in which he loves a strange woman in a strange city.

Viewed from this angle, "The Last Tango of Paris" offers an interesting insight into the type of revolutionary Mackers, leftism and badism, the eternal recurrence of exploitative gender relations in their so-called overtaking. Pretty sick, honest enough.

Subordinate to masculine lust and desire to show

However, the process of creating the scene was perfectly dishonest: Bertolucci and Brando had thought of it in the morning before filming, without presenting Schneider. Bertolucci would have liked to capture their authentic shock about improvised (simulated) rape. Schneider was made available as an actress, she was subordinated as a woman of male desire and desire to show.

In 2013, Bertolucci had revealed the story of a public event in front of the camera. In 2016, the statements made a wider world tour, actress Jessica Chastain called for a boycott. In 2018, the #Metoo year, the style of the filming of "The Last Tango of Paris" was later cited as an excellent example of the film society's firm commitment to reserved badism. Schneider died in 2011, Bertolucci rightly guilty.

He belonged to a generation of highly politicized filmmakers who wanted to name and change the social conditions of filmmaking, such as the revolutionary drama "1900" of 1976. He also belonged to a generation of self-seeking authors inspired by hunger that became psychobadytically the nucleus For example, in the drama of the opera "La Luna" of 1976, behind the spirit of progressive intent often manifested a repressive mind, just as in the scene butter, Bertolucci's films often lent a truth to a second level. A cruel truth.

Small room game, great art

Abbitte had not been able to afford Bertolucci at Schneider before his death. But the year of his demise, he begins, after eight years, the titan of European-funded art and television cinema, which had produced monumental productions such as "The Last Emperor" or "The Last Emperor" Sky Over the Desert "in the eighties and nineties. sickness related to the break work on a small Italian Kammerspiel. It was his last film: "Me and You", the story of a 14-year-old teenager and his drug-using half-sister, released from all social restraints in a cellar.

In many ways, the film is a reflection of "The Last Tango": the narrow space, its own rules, the dedication of two people, the faith in the private way of utopia. In a central scene is also danced very idiosyncratic, to an Italian version of "Space Oddity" by David Bowie.

There is so much tenderness in the room than in any other film of the socialist who died on Monday at the age of 77. Bertolucci, it was not just the young man in the butter. But also the old dreamer.

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