The Big Screen (62 page)

We have to feel bold about greatness (because it inspires us). Still, Kael's excitement at
Last Tango in Paris
is poignant because the film is her testament. It asserts not just eroticism (which mattered to Kael), or what she called “the breakthrough” of film as a liberating force, but the hope that great sex and great movie could ride together—and save the world? That was a momentary prospect in the early 1970s, when inchoate issues of desire (the pursuit of happiness even) sometimes seemed to rest on the fate of cinema. It is what leaves Kael's cry of recognition close to tragic now.

Just two years earlier, Bernardo Bertolucci had made a masterpiece,
The Conformist
(1970), from a novel by Alberto Moravia. It is the story of Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a tense and masked young Italian in the age of fascism, who becomes an agent assigned to murder a former teacher, an antifascist, Professor Quadri. At the same time, Clerici is getting married to the lovely, foolish Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), but falling in love with Anna (Dominique Sanda), the wife of Quadri, and someone whose smart gaze sees through Clerici's mask.
The Conformist
has a complex series of flashbacks and an intricate camera style that build toward the final pursuit and its foul murder in a dark forest. What holds it together is the signal from the title, that Clerici is being drained of life by his urge to be conventional—and this is captured in Trintignant's hunched stance, his numb face, and his scuttling walk. What shocks in
The Conformist
is not simply its cinematic richness, but also the way that style expresses a numb dread of being exceptional, the terrible need to conform.

The film's beauty—often compared to that of Ophüls and von Sternberg—comes from the fraternal collaboration of Bertolucci with the photography of Vittorio Storaro and the work on design, décor, and costumes by Ferdinando Scarfiotti.
The Conformist
was an independent production, but its period craftwork had the layered look of a new kind of studio picture, more sophisticated than most things attempted by the old studios. It was a look that proved influential in America: the style of
The Conformist
encouraged the morally shaded Italianate New York of
The Godfather
. Indeed,
The Conformist
was one of those works made around 1970 that said, why should a movie not be as measured and beguiling as anything available in other arts?

For his next venture, Bertolucci was determined to deal with sex. He reasoned this was the moment—with censorship falling away like discarded clothing—to take on the real thing, the ultimate action of desire. Perhaps for decades the secret purpose of the movies had been simply to guide us, the subservient mass, from a culture of sanctioned love and marriage, ignorance, repression, and guilt into the glory of sexual liberty—as a right, as part of that larger happiness deal. So Bertolucci had a dream that, artistically (of course), he could make a film in which movie stars did the thing it was said hardcore performers were doing: they would fuck on camera—no more simulation. Wasn't that what we had been waiting for? Wasn't that what Viva and Louis Waldon (amateurs, or lovers) had done in Warhol's
Blue Movie
(1969), another of those films that said, look at the moment, look at their skin…look at
that!
At the end, Viva stares at the camera and asks, “Is it on?,” a question waiting for the future.

Bertolucci had a story about a haunted, middle-aged American in Paris whose wife has recently killed herself. Then, by chance, the man encounters a young woman in an empty apartment. Almost without a word they couple, urgently and comprehensively, and so for a time they use this apartment as their love nest or brothel. It is their sensual “now,” the present tense of film shutting out past or future. They promise to stay in the moment, without exchanging names or histories, so they can have “pure” sex. But the orgy gets out of hand, his past comes in and “love” intervenes (on the part of the man). It all ends badly. We foresaw that because, in our first sight of him (Marlon Brando in a shit-colored overcoat), the man was howling at the air of Paris and the miseries of mankind.

Bertolucci had intended to cast Dominique Sanda as the girl, but she was pregnant. Sanda had been so knowing and fatalistic in
The Conformist
it is hard to imagine
Last Tango
with her. She was twenty-four in 1972, more elegant, more ironic; and Sanda never seemed prepared to be as naked as Maria Schneider agreed to be. Schneider was four years younger and without experience, though she was the illegitimate daughter of the French actor Daniel Gélin (he had been in Ophüls's
La Ronde
). She was baby-faced, voluptuous, and impulsive, and people who knew her said she was not too stable. Of course Marlon Brando would have said he was mixed up, too.

But Brando was as famous as any actor on film. He had had his ups and downs in the 1960s, but no one had forgotten his first films, and public faith had been revived by his skilled rendering of Don Vito Corleone in
The Godfather
. Close to fifty, Brando was so beautiful still that romanticism and sensuality survived in his restless glance. His deal on
Last Tango
was $250,000 against a percentage of the profits. Maria Schneider was getting $4,000. Such disparities are not uncommon in the film business. An agent or a lawyer could say Brando was world-famous, at the top of his art, and on commercial form; the allure for the public of Marlon Brando doing it was beyond compare. (Jean-Louis Trintignant had turned the role down.) Schneider was a beginner, without reputation; she was pretty, and willing in ways thousands of girls might match.

But if you went to see
Last Tango
(and the film had worldwide rentals of $37 million on a budget of $1.25 million, even if it seldom left viewers pleased or satisfied), you could not miss Schneider being naked so much of the time—while Brando kept his clothes on. This was a film about sexual commitment—that was made clear to the players from the start, and it was a boast to the audience. Brando had been hired on the understanding that he would bring his own experience and memories to the role of Paul. When he went back to the character's past, he was often talking for himself—this was the gist of the Method he had been raised with. But we do not see Brando's penis, and there was still uncertainty in the movie business as to whether that would be permitted. So the girl's erogenous zones are on show, while the man's are withheld, and a secret power is given to them, a withholding that feels unfair now if
Last Tango
really means to be about the orgiastic ideal or about characters who meet on open ground.

In preparation, Bertolucci had told his two players he wanted them to have sex on camera. “Is it on?” In his autobiography, Brando said that he tried:

You notice that Schneider, the likeliest encouragement Brando might have had, does not seem to be present or considered. When Bertolucci said, have real sex, Brando demurred because, “it would have completely changed the picture and made our sex organs the focus of the story.” Again, there is no evidence that Maria Schneider was asked. Whether the “focus” of the story would have been changed is one question. The other—and this is more important—is whether the thing itself could ever have been believable.

The first coupling, where the characters begin by being fully clothed, is acted—and it is stunning. Their embrace and the camera movement feel affecting. The later scenes become more revealing but less convincing. At one point, with Jeanne naked, Paul turns her over and uses a stick of butter to aid anal penetration. That is simulated, and deeply disturbing, because Schneider the novice conveys a distress beyond her talent as an actress. There is a sense of invasion, and we wonder, “Why are we watching?” The actress would say later that Brando and Bertolucci came up with the scene on the spur of the moment, so she felt powerless and even raped. To which the movie business customarily has answers like, well, weren't you paid?, and, surely you could have said no?, the ugliness of which is not to be shrugged off.

Why were we watching? Surely there was some expectation in wanting to see the movies and sex good together. Years later an inescapable disquiet glares through. For all the naturalness of Paul's talk from Brando's past and the being “on” of Jeanne's nakedness, there is the unnatural intervention of us watching. You don't really have to think yourself too far into the process of the film to say, well, suppose they were fucking; how would I ever know or trust it?

This realization about sexual desire on-screen being bypassed didn't dawn “suddenly”; the lesson had been sinking in since around 1960, that the more boldly a movie tried to deliver sexual experience, the more surely it exposed its own artifice or falsehood and the more clearly it told us we were in our “there,” in the dark, not on the screen, not having sex. The desire was thwarted. The overwhelming promise of the medium was a fleshless seduction. Desire was being manipulated, just as it was in advertisements. The light was a trick to keep the audience in its dark. Enlightenment, liberty—those great dreams were for suckers. A bleak new citizenship was in prospect.

Last Tango
seemed a scandalous event in 1972. William F. Buckley called it pornography. In Italy, Bertolucci had his civil rights withdrawn, and the film was banned for fifteen years. In America it was promoted—and Pauline Kael's review was a part of that. But the film has shifted. In 1972, the apartment near the Bir-Hakeim bridge in Paris was a real place, albeit one staged by Scarfiotti and Storaro in a color scheme of flesh tones that felt “right” or suggestive. Now it seems less a set than a metaphor for the screen itself, the displacement that allows them to perform and us to watch—and which permits nothing else. More and more in our movies the prison-like isolation of the screen has invaded the form, the stories, and the experience. What's left isn't exactly life. And we wanted it to be.

Once you've seen through the movies' handling of sex, you may notice the same dilemma affecting many other extreme situations. The dead on film are pretending—they'd better be, because if ever real killing is filmed, the thing called “snuff,” then the outrage goes beyond entertainment. But that possibility is a rumor that never stops. So we peer at the dead bodies on film to see if they're still breathing, still pulsing. Can you read a “dead” face waiting for “Cut!,” ready to crack a joke and ease an awkward posture? When people are chopped or chainsawed to pieces, we gaze through the ruin and ask only how it was done.

So what's wrong with simulation and pretending? They are the well-spring of acting, and, for myself, I mistrust the codes or conventions by which actors believe they have become their part or gotten lost in it. It is a vanity that nearly always adds time and money to a schedule. It leads to a “truth” that defies the nature of the medium.

Still, the advance on sexual glory and revelation so touchingly invoked in Kael's words and the reference to
Le Sacre
are a prelude to disappointment. Perhaps the chemistry of fantasy, and the censorship that withheld fulfillment, were essential to the power of cinema. The rapture people felt was contingent on the limits. The removal of censorship was an undermining of the medium (if you want to be solemn) or a natural, helpless progress. It wouldn't have been so grave a consequence if the history of film was not so tied up in the larger history of ourselves. For the great question we face in life is what to do with our desire or identity (the hope that lets us endure reality). Can we sustain these things, or must they turn to ashes? Do we still believe in the pursuit of happiness or has it become an advertiser's trick and a fool's errand?

In his coy way, Brando would say, “
Last Tango in Paris
received a lot of praise, though I always thought it was excessive. Pauline Kael in particular praised it highly, but I think her review revealed more about her than about the movie.” By 1972, film critics had become deserving, too. They had a voice and their own desire, and in her way, Kael was as ready to go naked as Maria Schneider. That's why she was so cheerful about Jeanne in the film:

Kael was so readable. But even in 1972, I think, more anguish or confusion was showing, and being felt in the dark. Maria Schneider died on February 3, 2011. She was fifty-eight, and hers wasn't a movie face anymore. She had done drugs and had breakdowns and had not made many films—though she is excellent in Antonioni's
The Passenger
(1975). There's no need to make her into a forlorn icon, or another Marilyn, but still, the pattern cannot be denied—it goes from William Holden to Maria Schneider—that being the object of intense, impossible desire can suck your life away. Perhaps it has a similar effect on us in the dark.