Last Tango in Paris Page: 7
Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics
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If these recuperative gestures are permissible within the privileged space of the apartment, they are, like the fantasies of cinema itself, unacceptable in the light of day. There she no longer reflects, she reacts. When Paul pursues her, she leads him first to the dance hall where they reenact a burlesque of their earlier relationship and where Jeanne ambivalently masturbates Paul and then flees. In her father's apartment, Paul reduces to an aggressive, sexist stranger, donning her father's military cap as a sign of his unambiguous desires and a reaffirmation of his doubling of the father. Jeanne's pistol shot fired at his genitals violently reaffirms the unacceptability of such exploitation. Paul staggers to the balcony of her apartment and, as a reminder of his regression, childishly sticks a piece of gum onto the balcony railing, curls into a fetal position, and dies. As the camera tracks back into the apartment from the balcony, it catches, as if accidentally, the reflection of one of Bertolucci's camera crew in a pane of the French windows. Another viewer viewed!
Ultimately, the genius of this film is to have brought together in a single work several different levels of thinking: the mythic, the psychoanalytic, and the metacinematic. Jeanne may be said to be the nexus of these themes, for she represents at once the displaced object of Paul's Orphic quest, the projected image of Tom's artistic drive, and the distanced object of the viewer's voyeurism. In so interweaving these themes, the film does not merely contain a spectacle for the viewer but challenges his very status as viewer. The outraged, middle-aged dance hall judge shouts mindlessly to the mooning Paul, "Where's love fit in ? Go to the movies to see love!" And so we have. The film achieved an extraordinary status because the critics assured us it was "the most powerfully erotic movie ever made." While concentrating on Paul's obsession with penetrating Jeanne's body and Tom's frantic attempts to film it, Bertolucci has made his viewers conscious of their own role as voyeurs and ultimately of their own fascination with the primal scene.
Through the voyage enacted in this film, we may better understand the degree to which cinema itself is an Orphic experience: to descend into the darkness of a protected space in an effort to retrieve through images a lost origin.
If I go back and reread my working diary of Novecento, I realize that at a certain point I developed diplopia ... was seeing double. The more I concentrated, the more I saw double. Appropriately it was in the ninth month of shooting.
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
From the Book Bertolucci's Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema. Contributors: T. Jefferson Kline - author. Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press. Place of Publication: Amherst, MA. Publication Year: 1987
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