Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (47 page)

Faced with a passage across that land, men make various kinds of ac commodations. Some ignore it; some try to avoid it through temporary distractions; some are lucky enough to have the inner resources for a successful journey. But of those who do not, some turn to the most highly charged resources of the body; lacking the mental strength to face crisis and death, they turn on the sexual mechanism, which can at least be depended upon to function, usually.

That's what the sex is about in this film (and in Cries and Whispers). It's not sex at all (and it's a million miles from intercourse). It's just a physical function of the soul's desperation. Paul in Last Tango in Paris has no difficulty in achieving an erection, but the gravest difficulty in achieving a lifeaffirming reason for one.

THE MOVIE REVISITED, AUGUST II, 1995

Watching Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris twenty-three years after it was first released is like revisiting the house where you used to live, and where you did wild things you don't do anymore. Wandering through the empty rooms, which are smaller than you remember them, you recall a time when you felt the whole world was right there in your reach, and all you had to do was take it.

This movie was the banner for a revolution that never happened. "The movie breakthrough has finally come," Pauline Kael wrote, in the most famous movie review ever published. "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form." The date of the premiere, she said, would become a landmark in movie history comparable to the night in 1913 when Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed, and ushered in modern music. Last Tango premiered, in case you have forgotten, on October 14, 1972. It did not quite become a landmark. It was not the beginning of something new, but the triumph of something old-the "art film," which was soon to be replaced by the complete victory of mass-marketed "event films." The shocking sexual energy of Last Tango in Paris and the daring of Marlon Brando and the unknown Maria Schneider did not lead to an adult art cinema. The movie frightened off imitators, and instead of being the first of many X-rated films dealing honestly with sexuality, it became almost the last. Hollywood made a quick U-turn into movies about teenagers, technology, action heroes, and special effects. And with the exception of a few isolated films like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and in the Realm of the Senses, the serious use of graphic sexuality all but disappeared from the screen.

I went to see Last Tango of Paris again because it is being revived at Facets Multimedia, that temple of great cinema, where the largest specialized video sales operation in the world subsidizes a little theater where people still gather to see great films projected through celluloid onto a screen. (I am reminded of the readers in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, who committed books to memory in order to save them.)

It was a good 35 mm print, and I was drawn once again into the hermetic world of these two people, Paul and Jeanne, their names unknown to each other, who meet by chance in an empty Paris apartment and make sudden, brutal, lonely sex. Paul's marriage has just ended with his wife's suicide. Jeanne's marriage is a week or two away, and will supply the conclusion for a film being made by her half-witted fiance.

In anonymous sex they find something that apparently they both need, and Bertolucci shows us enough of their lives to guess why. Paul (Brando) wants to bury his sense of hurt and betrayal in mindless animal passion. And Jeanne (Schneider) responds to the authenticity of his emotion, however painful, because it is an antidote to the prattle of her insipid boyfriend and bourgeois mother. Obviously their "relationship," if that's what it is, cannot exist outside these walls, in the light of the real world.

The first time I saw the film there was the shock of its daring. The "butter scene" had not yet been cheapened in a million jokes, and Brando's anguished monologue over the dead body of his wife-perhaps the best acting he has ever done-had not been analyzed to pieces. It simply happened. I once had a professor who knew just about everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet, and told us he would trade it all in for the opportunity to read the play for the first time. I felt the same way during the screening: I was so familiar with the film that I was making contact with the art instead of the emotion.

The look, feel, and sound of the film are evocative. The music by Gato Barbieri is sometimes counterpoint, sometimes lament, but it is never simply used to tell us how to feel. Vittorio Storaro's slow tracking shots in the apartment, across walls and the landscapes of bodies, are cold and remote; there is no attempt to heighten the emotions. The sex is joyless and efficient, and beside the point: whatever the reasons these two people have for what they do with one another, sensual pleasure is not one of them.

Brando, who can be the most mannered of actors, is here often affectless. He talks, he observes, he states things. He allows himself bursts of anger and that remarkable outpouring of grief, and then at the end he is wonderful in the way he lets all of the air out of Paul's character by turning commonplace with the speech where he says he likes her. The moment is wonderful because it releases the tension, it shows what was happening in that apartment, and we can feel the difference when it stops.

In my notes I wrote: "He is in scenes as an actor, she is in scenes as a thing." This is unfair. Maria Schneider, an unknown whose career dissipated after this film, does what she can with the role, but neither Brando nor Bertolucci was nearly as interested in Jeanne as in Paul. Because I was young in 1972, I was unable to see how young Jeanne (or Schneider) really was; the screenplay says she is twenty and Paul is forty-five, but now when I see the film she seems even younger, her open-faced lack of experience contradicting her incongruously full breasts. Both characters are enigmas, but Brando knows Paul, while Schneider is only walking in Jeanne's shoes.

The ending. The scene in the tango hall is still haunting, still part of the whole movement of the third act of the film, in which Paul, having created a searing moment out of time, now throws it away in drunken banality. The following scenes, leading to the unexpected events in the apartment of Jeanne's mother, strike me as arbitrary and contrived. But still Brando finds a way to redeem them, carefully remembering to park his gum before the most important moment of his life.

JANUARY 12, 1973

ederico Fellini first included his name in the title of one of his movies with Fellini Satyricon (1969), and then for legal reasons: a quickie Italian version of the Satyricon was being palmed off in international film markets as the real thing. Once having savored the notion, however, Fellini found it a good one, and now we have Fellini's Roma, to be followed in a year or two by Fellini's Casanova. The name in the title doesn't seem conceited or affected, as it might from another director (Peckinpah's Albuquerque?). This is Fellini's Rome and nobody else's, just as all of his films since La Dolce Vita have been autobiographical musings and confessions from the most personal-and the best-director of our time. Any connection with a real city on the map of Italy is libelous. Fellini's Rome gets its suburbs trimmed when he goes for a haircut.

The movie isn't a documentary, although sometimes he lets it look like one. It's a rambling essay, meant to feel like free association. There's a very slight narrative thread, about a young man named Fellini who leaves the little town of Rimini and comes to the great city and is overwhelmed by its pleasures of body and spirit. He moves into a mad boardinghouse that would make a movie all by itself: he dines with his neighbors in great outdoor feasts when the summer heat drives everyone into the piazzas, he attends a raucous vaudeville show, and he visits his first whorehouse ... and then his second.

This material, filmed with loving attention to period detail, exists by itself in the movie ; there's no effort to link the naive young Fellini with the confident genius who appears elsewhere in the movie. It's as if Fellini, the consummate inventor of fantasies, didn't grow out of his young manhoodhe created it from scratch.

The autobiographical material is worked in between pseudodocumentary scenes that contain some of the most brilliant images Fellini has ever devised. The movie opens with a monumental Roman traffic jam that, typically, becomes important because Fellini has deigned to photograph it. He swoops above it on a crane, directing his camera, his movie, and the traffic. A blinding rainstorm turns everything into a hellish apparition, and then there's a final shot, held just long enough to make its point, of the autos jammed around the Coliseum.

The image is both perfect and natural; as someone commented about Fellini's 8/, his movies are filled with images, and they're all obvious. If Bergman is the great introvert of the movies, forever probing more and more deeply, Fellini is the joyous exponent of surfaces and excess, of letting more hang out than there is. The obviousness of his images gives his movies a curious kind of clarity; he isn't reaching for things to say, but finding ways to say the same things more memorably. The decadence of Rome has been one of his favorite subjects throughout his career, and who could forget Anita Ekberg in the fountain or the Mass procession at dawn in La Dolce Vita?

But in Roma he is even more direct, more stark: an expedition to inspect progress on the Rome subway system suddenly becomes transcendent when workmen break through to an underground crypt from preChristian times. The frescoes on the walls are so clear they might have been painted yesterday-until the air of the modern city touches them. Rome, the eternal city, has historically been as carnal as it has been sacred. Fellini won't settle for one or the other; he uses scenes of carnality to symbolize a blessed state, and vice versa. Nothing could be more eternal, more patient, and more resigned than Fellini's use of a weary prostitute standing beside a highway outside Rome. She is tall, huge-bosomed, garishly made up, and her feet are tired. She stands among the broken stones of the Roman Empire, expecting nothing, hoping for nothing.

The prostitute, so often used as a symbol of fleeting moments and insubstantial experiences, becomes eternal; and the church, always the symbol of the unchanging, the rock, becomes temporal. In his most audacious sequence, Fellini gives us an "ecclesiastical fashion show," with rollerskating priests and nuns whose habits are made of blinking neon lights. What is unreal, and where is the real? Fellini doesn't know, and he seems to believe that Rome has never known. Rome has simply endured, waiting in the hope of someday finding out. Fellini's Roma has been attacked in some circles as an example of Fellini coasting on his genius. I find this point of view completely incomprehensible. Critics who would force Fellini back into traditional narrative films are missing the point; Fellini isn't just giving us a lot of flashy scenes, he's building a narrative that has a city for its protagonist instead of a single character.

The only sly thing is that the city isn't Rome-it's Fellini, disguised in bricks, mortar, and ruins. Fellini, who cannot find his way between the flesh and the spirit, who cannot find the connection between his youth and his greatness, and whose gift is to make movies where everything is obvious and nothing is simple. That was the dilemma that the Fellini character faced in 8%, when he couldn't make sense of his life, and it's the dilemma we all face every day, isn't it?