Last Tango in Paris Page: 2
Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics
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IMAGES:
Picture Gallery 1 Miscellaneous Pictures
Picture Gallery 2 Miscellaneous Pictures
Movie Stills
The Godfather Photos
M. Brando & Godfather Posters, Prints, Photos
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The first and most obvious question to arise is: Who is being rescued ? By his insistent allusions to Cocteau's use of the Orpheus myth, and particularly through insistence on the passage through the mirror, Bertolucci suggests an answer to this question, for obviously in Cocteau's Orphée and Sang d'un poète the mirror serves primarily to reflect oneself, and to pass through the mirror represents a fantasy of self-exploration. Michel Serres has demonstrated how, in another version of the Orpheus myth alluded to in this film, Jules Verne's Château de Carapathe, the Orpheus figure pursues his own image into a "sacred space," perceives the image of his loved one (in this case himself) on a screen, and plunges through the screen, causing an explosion of the entire inner space and ultimate madness.
Tango is remarkably similar. The key to Paul's self-recuperation lies not only in the use of mirror-imaging (to which I shall return) but also in the correct identification of the Rosa/Jeanne figure. Rosa, we must remember, functioned primarily as a mother/wife figure for Paul. She had "adopted" him and supported him for years but had never given him her complete attention. Paul knows all too well that Rosa has a lover who is to some degree a double of himself, and as "readers" of Bertolucci's work we cannot fail to see a reference to the doubling of Athos Magnani in this configuration. Rosa, like Draifa, becomes an object of intense ambivalence—a desired love object and a hated betrayer. This mother role is reiterated visually when the chambermaid, a remarkable look-alike of Rosa's mother, reenacts Rosa's suicide, saying, "I did everything just like her." Later, before Rosa's bier, Paul will observe sarcastically, "You're your mother's masterpiece!" And to Rosa's mother, he intones, "Rosa was a lot like you.... People must have told you often.... Isn't that right, Mother?" Rosa's mother answers, "Two sisters." Paul will vent his feelings onto both the maid and the mother at several different points in the film.
D. W. Winnicott has noted the mother's function as mirror in child development: "What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face ? ... himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. " Such a function is normally greatly transformed in adult behavior and would be over- interpretive in this instance were it not for several factors: the insistent presence of mirrors in the film—especially in scenes weighted with problems of either self-definition or regression; the emphatically regressive sexual behavior of Paul in the apartment; and the allusion to Francis Bacon that opens the film.
The several Bacon paintings successively occupying the screen at the outset of the film immediately set the problematics of identity that will pervade the entire work. Winnicott insists on Bacon's allusion to the mirror and identity in his essay on the mother's mirror role:
Francis Bacon ... the exasperating and skillful and challenging
artist of our time who goes on and on painting the human face
distorted significantly ... is seeing himself in his mother's face, but
with some twist that maddens both him and us.... Bacon's faces
seem to be far removed from perception of the actual; in looking at
faces he seems ... to be painfully striving towards being seen,
which is at the basis of creative looking.
Winnicott quotes one of his patients as having said, "Wouldn't it be awful if the child looked into the mirror and saw nothing?" Transposed into Winnicott's own terms, the question may be posed, "Wouldn't it be awful if I looked at Mother's face and was unable to see my own being?" Bertolucci has uncannily captured this very moment in the scene at Rosa's bier. She is an expressionless mask to whom Paul turns for some sign of identity, both hers and his own. Her mother (whose resemblance to Rosa is an obsession for Paul) wears a similar mask in life. And there is a further allusion to Rosa's blindness while alive. As Paul leaves the room of his double, Marcel, he muses, "I wonder what she ever saw in you." By condensing this expression of anxiety here displaced onto an explicit double, we may understand, "I wonder what she ever saw in me."
In discussing Bacon's presence in the film, Bertolucci said, "I took Marlon [Brando] to the exhibition of Bacon's paintings and said, 'That's what you should be.' " That may be generally true of Brando's face, which manages to look so plastic and tortured throughout, but it is nowhere more true than when he first confronts the scene of Rosa's absent presence. In the bathroom covered with Rosa's blood, Brando passes behind a screen of frosted glass so that his face appears to take on the same distortions as the Bacon paintings. It is clearly the moment at which Paul most desperately seeks a lost maternal image. Later, after his most intense punishment of Jeanne and the notion of family—that is, his sodomizing of Jeanne—Bertolucci's camera again captures Brando lying twisted on the floor in exactly the position of the first Bacon painting to be glimpsed. This reference to Bacon with Jeanne most convincingly reemphasizes the doubling of Rosa by Jeanne and Paul's double failure to get her back. Notably, Jeanne's face remains hidden to Paul in this scene.
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