No Names

One from the 'Why Did I never Get Round To Watching' file. To it's credit, for a movie that provoked all kinds of moral froth and pompous outrage at the time of its release in 1972, Last Tango In Paris has not dated at all. The rightly infamous anal rape scene with the butter is perfectly set within the economy of the film as a whole; a sequence of moral and psycho-sexual tableaux are set up within the spatial personality of a Paris apartment, which seems to exert a terrible influence on "Paul" (Brando)and Jeanne (Maria Schneider). By far the strongest elements are the relationships and barriers set up and enabled by the apartment building itself: Glass partitions, door-frames, window blinds, shower curtains, internal windows all form a supporting cast of blindnesses, impediments, silences, exposings.

The film seems to lose its psychological confidence about an hour in: The asides featuring Jeanne's husband-to-be become ugly gear-changes, and the Paul-Jeanne relationship loses its dreamlike, Tragic dimension. Paul's character is far too over-drawn in comparison with the brief and comparatively lightweight treatment of Jeanne's life outside the apartment. The early sequences feel as if they are the scenes you would imagine reading a novel, fleshing-out spare words on a page.