The Great Movies III

Now it is 2004 and Brando is dead. As I looked at the film yet again, Brando's most powerful scene resonated for me in an unexpected way. The scene where he confronts the body of his wife, who has committed suicide, and mourns her in an outpouring of rage and grief. "I may be able to comprehend the universe, but I'll never understand the truth about you," he says. He calls her vile names, then is torn by sobs. He tries to wipe off her cosmetic death mask ("Look at you! You're a monument to your mother! You never wore makeup, never wore false eyelashes."). He doesn't understand why she killed herself, why she abandoned him, why she never really loved him in the first place, why he was always more of a guest in her hotel than a husband in her bed.

As I watched this scene, I was struck by a strange notion. I watched it again, this time imagining that Brando was talking to his own dead body-that his anger and love, his blame and grief, were directed toward himself. I'm sure Bernardo Bertolucci, the film's director, did not have this in mind, and of course I cannot know what Brando was thinking. But here was a man who sometimes prostituted his own talent, who frustrated his admirers by seeming to scorn them, whose "eventual monstrous obesity seemed a clear sign of his hatred for Hollywood," as Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the best of the Brando obituaries. This was the greatest movie actor of his time, the author of performances that do honor to the cinema, and yet as Kauffmann notes, he was driven to disparage the profession of acting, which was the instrument of his genius.

His wife in Last Tango in Paris owned and ran a little hotel. "It's kind of a dump, but not completely a flophouse," he says, but the film clearly shows it as a place where prostitutes bring their clients. So he was living off a woman who lived off whores. "I moved in for one night and stayed five years," he muses. Can this refer to his love-hate for Hollywood, for acting, for his own career, for the waste he was sometimes compelled to make of his talent? Is it himself that he'll never understand the truth about?

We cannot know. These ideas exist in my mind, and it is wrong to place them in Brando's. But such a narcissistic actor never held more love and grief for anybody else than he held for himself, and I say that not as an insult but as a way of explaining his power: in his best performances, he is sorry for himself. We see the wounded little boy-quite clearly, for example, in the monologue in Last Tango recalling his character's childhood. Yes, at the end he was fat. A lot of people get fat. But what a thing to happen to Marlon Brando. How better to destroy an actor's vanity, how better to force us to admire him for himself and not because Stanley Kowalski looked sexy in a torn T-shirt? Did he eat as he did out of self-pity, because he felt he deserved to, because he felt deprived?

The history of Last Tango in Paris (1972) has and always will be dominated by Pauline Kael. "The movie breakthrough has finally come," she wrote, in what may be the most famous movie review ever published. "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form." She said the film's premiere was an event comparable to the night in 1913 when Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was first performed and ushered in modern music. As it has turned out, Last Tango was not a breakthrough but more of an elegy for the kind of film she championed. In the years since, mass Holly wood entertainments have all but crushed art films, which were much more successful then than now. Although pornography documents the impersonal mechanics of sex, few serious films challenge actors to explore its human dimensions; isn't it remarkable that no film since 1972 has been more sexually intimate, revealing, honest, and transgressive than Last Tango?

The film begins when Paul (Brando) and Jeanne (Maria Schneider) meet in a Paris apartment they are both considering renting. Paul, we will learn, is planning a move from his dead wife's hotel. Jeanne is planning marriage with Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud), an insipid young director. Within moments after they meet, Paul forces sudden, needful sex upon her. It would be rape were it not that Jeanne does not object or resist, makes her body available almost with detachment. Indeed, it is rape in Paul's mind, Paul's sexual release seems real, here and throughout the film, but we are never sure what Jeanne feels during their sex. Although she cries during the famous "butter scene," she is not crying about the sex and indeed doesn't seem to be thinking about it.