Last Tango in Paris Page: 4. Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics

poet, pariah, pervert become martyr.... He represents ... a free, nomadic, and irresponsible life, sexuality without complexes, which he can only have by renouncing all security and taboos. He is the man from somewhere else who brings with him his freedom. His three traits are his guitar [read bongos here], his wings, and his animal nature. He is an ambiguous animal whose blood is hot or cold according to his mood (or metamorphosis). "O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht giebt," the nonexistent beast of Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, who fascinates women and disturbs men.... Orpheus is that which has no name, no face, no expression, that which is hidden, unknown, that which in man is foreign to man, at least so he believes, his unconscious, his intuitions, the dreams he dares not recall or realize, poetry, the poem he carries within with which he does nothing or which he destroys.... The truth of Orpheus is the truth of the poem, a life work which one must snatch from the powers of death—it is the eternal struggle of Eros against Thanatos. Orpheus is, like other men, split between the creative and the destructive drives.

Significantly, Bertolucci's Paul refuses names, prefers animal grunts and crows to language, and pursues his erotic dream ever closer to death, proclaiming finally to his willing/unwilling Eurydice, Jeanne, "You're all alone. And you won't be able to be free of the feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face. I mean, that sounds like bullshit and some romantic crap. Until you go right up into the ass of death—right up his ass—till you find a womb of fear. And then, maybe then you can—you'll be able to find him." For Paul, the association of love and self-love seems to lead directly to a confluent description of anality, the maternal womb, and death, a verbal prefiguration of his own fetallike position as he dies.

Bertolucci comments on this relationship among sex, narcissism, and death as follows: "I quickly realized when shooting, that when you show the depths ... you drown yourself, as it were, in that feeling of solitude and death that attaches to a relationship in our Western, bourgeois society.... Sex is very close to death in feeling. " The film becomes a vertiginous dance conducted on the frontier that so narrowly separates Eros from Thanatos, a voyage so persistently Orphic as to be uncanny.

In his various versions of the Orpheus myth, Jean Cocteau repeatedly insists on the relation of primary narcissism to death. "Mirrors," Cocteau once wrote, "are doors through which Death enters our soul, and through which Orpheus enters the kingdom of Death."

Earlier, Francis Bacon's allusion to the mirror was noted. Bertolucci extends that allusion to include a notion of decomposition and death: "Marlon Brando resembles Francis Bacon's characters.... his face has that same plasticity of life in decomposition." And he quotes Cocteau, "Faire du cinéma, c'est saisir la mort au travail [To make films is to catch Death at work]."

But Bacon's work constitutes another kind of reference point for Bertolucci as well. Not only do the Bacon paintings seem to signal issues of identity and the relationship between narcissism and death, but they bring these several themes together with another ongoing and fundamental issue for Bertolucci: the identity of the cinematic process itself. First of all, Bacon's work has much to do with mirroring, for "to look at a painting by Bacon is to look into a mirror and to see there our own afflictions and our fears." John Rothenstein also notes that Bacon's preference for glazing his paintings derives from "his belief that the fortuitous play of reflections will enhance his pictures ... by enabling the spectator to see his own face in the glass." Winnicott relates Bacon and a more fundamental historical process in the child: "In looking at faces he seems ... to be painfully striving towards being seen, which is at the basis of creative looking. I am linking apperception with perception by postulating an historical process (in the individual) which depends on being seen. When I look I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see. I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive."

Viewers of Last Tango in Paris also look at/through a kind of glass. In his previous films, Bertolucci has compellingly alluded to the spectator's role as voyeur and suggested the intricacies of the dynamics of the film experience. In Last Tango Bertolucci presents an analysis that is no longer merely allusive.

It is Bertolucci's genius to have raised issues in the content of the film that are fundamental to the film experience itself. It is even more extraordinary that he uses a single nodal point in the film—indeed, at the very margins of the film—to allude to so many different but intensely related issues: seeing, mirroring, identity, ontology. The mirroring suggested in the Bacon paintings brings us back to the issue of doubles in the film, this time to a double whose function is almost entirely metacinematic.

Thus far I have explored the double relationships linking Paul with Marcel and Jeanne with Rosa, for these inform most directly the anecdotal level of exchange in the film. Tom, however, serves as the most intricate double of all, for in his character are linked the psychological and metacinematic levels of the work.

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