Last Tango in Paris Page: 5. Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics

In the scene of Tom's arrival in Paris, the arched metalwork of the Gare St. Lazare repeats the visual effect of Jeanne's first meeting with Paul under the Passy trestle. Jeanne's fiancé, Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud), emerges from a train at the Gare St. Lazare and attempts to capture Jeanne with an enthusiasm and unquestioned license equal to Paul's but here displaced onto the medium of cinema itself. In this first encounter, a film technician thrusts a phallic-shaped microphone into Jeanne's face while Tom declaims on love. Each time Tom and Jeanne meet, this sadly artificial phallus (always proffered by one of Tom's crew) replaces Paul's "hap-penis." Throughout the film we are to witness the same explicit parallelism of behavior between Paul and Tom with, in each case, Tom's version of Paul's behavior expressed in terms of displacement from a purely sexual (pornographic) to a purely visual (photographic) form of interaction. Jeanne at one point exasperatedly reminds him, "I'm supposed to marry you, not the camera." Ironically, too, it will be to Tom and not to Paul that Jeanne complains, "You should have asked my permission.... You take advantage of me and make me do things I've never done before. I'm tired of being raped!" In their first meeting, however, Tom is unable to comprehend Jeanne's sarcasm and mimicry as such and, in response to her mock romantic excesses, cries, "Magnifique! Coupez !"

Bertolucci obediently does, raising questions about the status of the film we are watching and its relation to the film we watch in the making. These questions are further emphasized by a curious portrayal of Paul in the next scene shot in the bathroom where Rosa's suicide has been effected. If Tom's role is to double Paul's erotic behavior with a camera, Paul seems to respond with a metacinematic double of his own, indeed on two levels. Filmed repeatedly behind the beveled and frosted glass of the bathroom, his face takes on, as I mentioned earlier, exactly the distortions of the Bacon paintings. Moreover, as the maid discusses her conversation with the police who had investigated the death, she repeats the salient features of Paul's biography: He was a boxer, had been a revolutionary in South America, had gone to Tahiti, and was later a journalist in Japan, ending up married to a rich woman in Paris. As Beverle Houston and Marsha Kinder have pointed out, each of these elements corresponds to a role Marlon Brando had played in earlier films : a boxer in On the Waterfront, a revolutionary in Viva Zapata, a sea captain in Mutiny on the Bounty, concluding with his roles in Teahouse of the August Moon and Sayonara. That Paul's biography is in fact Brando's film biography suggests two different levels of interpretation: As actor, Brando's filmography would also have to include, if implicitly, his role as Val in the film version of Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending. Paul's bongos must then also certainly constitute another cinematic reference: to Black Orpheus. Secondly, this heightened consciousness of Brando as film actor further accentuates the spectator's sense of Last Tango as a film and emphasizes Paul's doubling of Tom as film director. That doubling is conducted with extraordinary complexity throughout the entire film.

Each of Paul's interdictions against turning to the past is countered by Tom's enthusiastic insistence on capturing the woman and her past, but only on celluloid. Following Paul's manifesto, "No names here! ... It's beautiful without knowing anything about your past," Bertolucci jump-cuts to Jeanne's country house where Tom's camera makes its symbolic but impotent descent: "The camera is high.... It slowly descends toward you. And as you advance, it moves in on you.... It gets closer and closer to you." Here Tom parodies the mythical descent of his more carnal partner, as always displacing his sexual drives onto the camera. As if instinctively applying Paul's rule to this other space, Jeanne discourages Tom's probing with the warning, "It's melancholy to look behind you." But Tom will not understand and shouts, "It's marvellous.... It's your childhood—everything I want.... I'm opening all the doors.... Reverse gear ! ! ! Close your eyes. Back up, keep going, find your childhood again ! You are 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9." Jeanne repeats the warning, holding up a portrait of her cousin Paul, his eyes closed, but Tom is oblivious. Significantly, he films her through glass in this scene, emphasizing the distance separating them. Exasperated by his single-mindedness and perhaps recalling Paul's reminiscences of cowshit, Jeanne reads a childhood composition about how the cow is entirely "clothed in leather," and instead of Paul's list of slang equivalents for the male member she offers dictionary definitions of menstruation and penis. Tom's exploration of surface and words have replaced Paul's hunger for carnal satisfaction.

Bertolucci presses this doubling throughout the film. For example, soon after we see Paul and Jeanne on the "good ship Lollipop" in the apartment, Bertolucci cuts to a scene of Tom and Jeanne on the Atalante in the canal. Not only do they replace physical presence with cameras and cinematic equipment, but they end up situated on a cinematic allusion to Jean Vigo. Everything Tom does or thinks seems "contaminated" by cinema. And whereas Paul and Jeanne have just discovered their Orphic names in a series of animalistic grunts and crows, Tom and Jeanne produce an empty parody of this language with a series of childlike yeses and nos. When Tom finally enters the Jules Verne apartment, he proposes his own form of intimacy: "I want to film you every day. In the morning when you wake up, then when you fall asleep. When you smile."

Significantly, Tom's obsession with capturing only the image of his lover places him in a focal position at the intersection of film director and film viewer. As a double of Bertolucci himself, he seems content to let Paul occupy the place of active lover while he assumes a more distant (and secure) position. Bertolucci said of this relationship, "Leaud is my past as a cinephile," and this is certainly borne out symbolically in such scenes as the gown fitting, where Tom is so ecstatic about comparing Jeanne to Rita Hayworth, Lauren Bacall, and the like that he loses sight of her altogether. But it is also true that Leaud is Bertolucci's past as cinéaste for, like the director of Before the Revolution, Leaud's camera frequently misses what it was intended to see. Twice during the interview with Jeanne at her house in the country the camera simply fails to keep up with the action. While Jeanne is reminiscing about her childhood, her faithful, racist maid interjects her own memories. Tom's crew wheels the hand-held camera to catch sight of the maid, but she disappears, leaving only closed doors or, in one case, a full- length portrait of de Gaulle. When they catch the children defecating in the family garden, Tom's crew rushes vainly after the kids, too late to catch what Bertolucci's camera has already captured. (In his ongoing and subtle doubling of Tom, Paul also evokes this earlier period of Bertolucci's when he recounts watching spittle on an old man's pipe. Always watching to see if it would fall off, like Bertolucci's camera on Agostino in Prima, Brando disappointedly admits, "I'd look around and it would be gone. I never saw it fall off.")

As a comment on his previous style, these scenes clearly mark Bertolucci's evolution from the earlier radical stylistic position of Prima toward a new exploration of the dynamics of the cinematic experience, less overtly radical but more determinedly aggressive.

In Tom's effort to restitute his sense of identity through a double displacement of his own desires onto the "legitimate" elements of filmmaking and through his projection of his own desires onto Jeanne, we may understand the underlying rationale for the filmmaker's and spectator's compulsion to watch the couple in the primal scene of the apartment. Earlier I cited Winnicott's reaction to the Bacon paintings that open the film. Winnicott suggests how these works relate to the frantic search for identity among the major characters of the film, but his thinking can also be applied to Bertolucci's long-standing issue of how "cinema looks at itself." Winnicott, in the passage already cited, convincingly relates Bacon to the issue of seeing and 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." Nowhere is perceiving more "affordable" and ultimately more potentially creative (in an ontological sense) than in cinema. While Paul tries to be perceived in the expressionless face of Rosa and subsequently in the doubled and mirroring face and body of Jeanne, the film's spectator works unconsciously through voyeurism toward a similar need.

Indeed, the very essence of cinema involves a fundamental condensation and displacement of exactly the kind Brando acts out for us on the screen. For him, the issue is a narcissistic recuperation of identity; for us, potentially, no less so. As a psychic phenomenon, voyeurism is a desire based on the primal scene fantasy. As Leo Bersani has noted:

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