Paris' eponymous tango is only tangential, and is engaged in ineptly and disruptively by Brando and Schneider toward the end. I've no idea what Debbie does when she isn't doing Dallas but I'd wager it isn't tangoing. It's why Last Tango in Paris is art - or at any rate "art" - and Debbie Does Dallas isn't. And, actually, names are quite important. In fact, their monikers are Paul and Jeanne. As he later puts it, "Everything outside this place is bullsh*t." "Because we don't need names!" snaps Brando. "But why?" wonders Maria Schneider, reasonably enough. In Last Tango the protagonists take it to the next level: through an accidental encounter at a flat for rent in Passy, in the seizième arrondissement, they agree to set up a love-nest without love, without knowledge of the most basic facts - tastes, interests, jobs, marital status, even names. Last Tango in Paris arose from a bog-standard male fantasy: Bernardo Bertolucci passed a girl on the street and wondered what it would be like to pick her up and have sex with her without knowing a single thing about her. The apotheosis of the phenomenon came in 1972 when suburban couples lined up to see Marlon Brando bark "Go get the butter!" and then went to the local Italian to discuss the scene over spaghetti Bolognaise with complimentary roll and, er, butter. A decade ago, Larry Flynt was reduced to applying to Washington for a federal bailout for the "adult entertainment industry": like the banks and auto-makers, it was supposed to be too big to fail, but then came the massive downturn, which is one thing you don't want to see in an "adult" film. Now, instead of the good old days of community porn on Main Street, it's a participation sport on the Internet. LAST TANGO IN PARIS BUTTER SCENE XVIDEOS MOVIEAnd suddenly cinematic sex, like so much real sex, was over almost as soon as it had begun, and the suburban porn movie was as obsolete a genre as silent comedy or singing-cowboy flicks. The breakout title was the Swedish hit I Am Curious (Yellow), in the wake of which came more films for the curious - Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones - until it all more or less petered away in an Emmanuelle sequel too far: Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle In Paris, Emmanuelle In Bangkok, Emmanuelle In Shawinigan, etc. But films about sex and with extensive nudity that played your local fleapit as if they were no different from Herbie Gets Rear-Ended or whatever Disney was making back then. Not porn films, which is (or was) a specialized genre. The early Seventies was the heyday of cinema porn. Bernardo Bertolucci made many films, but only once in a long career was his art perfectly in tune with the cultural moment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |