The Last Tango in Paris (1972), one of Bernardo Bertolucci’s best-known films, deals with a pathological relationship between Paul, a forty-something widower played by Marlon Brando, and Jeanne, a young French girl played by Maria Schneider, that takes place in an apartment that both want to rent. As the film develops, we see how the couple sinks into an abusive and obsessive relationship that leads to a tragic outcome. The apartment, an old Parisian flat, is the very incarnation of a locus terribilis, a place where the boundary between bios and zoē vanishes. As a matter of fact, the defining feature of our social existence, our name, disappears completely for the characters of the film. When Jeanne asks Paul his name he flatly refuses to answer:
“I don’t have a name.”
“Do you want to know mine?”
“No, no! I don’t… I don’t want to know your name. You don’t have a name and I don’t have a name either. Not one name.”
“Your are crazy.”
“Maybe I am, but I don’t want to know anything about you. I don’t wanna know where you live. Or where you come from. I wanna know nothing… nothing… nothing.”
“You scare me.”
“Nothing… You and I are gonna meet here… without knowing anything that goes on outside here. Ok?”
“But why?”
“Because… Because we don’t need names here. Don’t you see?…”1
The relations that tie the apartment with the locus terribilis don’t stop there. Within its walls, a sentimental relationship is woven in which an older man not only strips a young woman of her name—her social mask or persona (0.13)—but also infantilizes and abuses her sexually and psychologically (1.17), a genuine paradeisos. At first this dynamic appears as a game (it’s funny, its like playing grown-ups when you are little. I feel like a child again here, she confesses to her lover) but soon the relationship grows more violent. She is nonetheless irresistibly drawn to her place of torture. It is interesting to note that the sexuality of Marlon Brando’s character is marked by an intense anal fixation which shows clear signs of what in psychoanalysis is known as anal sadism, an issue we have already found in the forms of sovereignty presented in Ubu Roi and The Wall (1.18, 3.2).2
Bertolucci’s aesthetic decisions that tie the girl to the apartment are extraordinary. The first time Jeanne visits the old flat the color of her dress, her pantyhose and boots mimic the gradation on the walls; the attire and the apartment, the exterior of the woman and the interior of the place where her feelings take place are a reflection of each other. The film’s palette was inspired in the work of Francis Bacon, which was held in high regard by Bertolucci who, upon showing it to Brando, is quoted as saying: “I wanted Paul to be like the figures that obsessively return in Bacon: faces eaten by something coming from the inside.”3 It seems probable that Bertolucci had an inkling, on an unconscious level, of the reciprocity between inside and outside posited by his film.
Thus, Jeanne becomes the very site, the embodiment of the locus terribilis, a fact that seems to confirm that women and children are the originary recipients of sovereign violence and exception (0.17). Also, it is worth noticing that throughout the film Jeanne maintains a parallel relationship with Tom—her idealist fiancé who is shooting a movie with her as the protagonist—which serves as a counterweight to the abuses she endures in her relation with Paul. As a matter of fact, her “movie” could have been completely different if she had only stuck to his fiancé’s script. However, like an inverted image of the Song of Songs, Jeanne’s Shulamite no longer wants to know anything about her shepherd and surrenders unconditionally to Solomon (1.11).
The idea of the family as the original site of the exception would seem confirmed during the most shocking scene of the film, in which Paul pins Jeanne down on the living room floor and rapes her using a butter stick as lubricant. While penetrating her, Brando’s character tortures the girl with the following words:
“I’m gonna tell you about the family. That holy institution, meant to breed virtue in savages. I want you to repeat it after me.”
“No and no! No!”
“Repeat it. Say, “holy family.” Come on, say it. Go on. Holy family. Church of good citizens.”
“Church… Ch…”
“Good citizens.”
“Good citizens…”
“Say it. Say it! The children are tortured until they tell their first lie.”
“The children… are tortured…”
“Where the will is broken… by repression.”
“Where the will… broken… repression.”
“Where freedom…”
“Free… freedom!”
“…is assassinated. Freedom is assassinated by egotism.”4
Paul is an abused man, another victim of originary exception, who now resorts to abuse to vent his frustrations. By torturing, the sovereign tortures himself, he is just another creature locked in his own labyrinth (1.4). He is sovereign as much as homo sacer (0.12). The reciprocity between inside and outside outlined in the apartment also applies to the characters themselves; the terrible place they have created turns them inside out. Perhaps the most sincere pictorial representation of this circumstance is Francis Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), in which the sovereign has ceased to be an imposing figure (1.16) to become, according to critic Armin Zweite, a sinister and terrified being “afflicted by an emotional outburst and devoid of any authority.”
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)
The scene in question, known as the butter rape, caused considerable uproar among Italian film authorities and a week after the premiere, Bertolucci, producer Alberto Grimaldi and Maria Schneider (!) were arrested on charges of obscenity. In January of the following year, the court ordered that all copies of the film be burned, sentenced Bertolucci to four months in prison and revoked his civil rights, his bios, for five years (0.10, 0.12). The film remained banned in Italy until 1987. Most of original reviews of the film, like the one written by Norman Mailer for the New York Review of Books, alluded to the profusion of sexual scenes. None of them, however, referred to the famous scene as a rape.
In a 2007 interview, Maria Schneider revealed that the controversial scene was filmed without her approval or consent. During that day’s breakfast Bertolucci and Brando decided certain details of the scene that were not in the original script—specifically the role of the butter stick—without mentioning anything to Schneider. The actress stated that she felt “humiliated and to be honest […] a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.”5 The fact that the anal sex was simulated doesn’t make the situation any less grave, both the leading actor and the director conspired against a young and unexperienced actress who didn’t know that nobody on a movie set can be forced to do anything that is not explicitly stated in the script.
According to Schneider, during the filming, Bertolucci was “very manipulative, both of Marlon and myself, and would do certain things to get a reaction from me. Some mornings on set he would be very nice and say hello and on other days, he wouldn’t say anything at all.”6 Later on, in a 2013 interview for La Cinémathèque Française, Bertolucci gave a bland excuse for his behavior: eliciting a genuine reaction of frustration and anger from the young actress (you can’t be a spectator, oh no. You got to take these dreams and make them whole) Apparently, some scenes that didn’t make it to the final cut were humiliating even for an experienced actor like Brando. After seeing the theatrical version of the film, he finally understood his role in Bertolucci’s vision: he had served as a pawn, a proxy for the director’s fantasies, he had put so much of himself into the role and felt used. He refused to talk to Bertolucci for nearly two decades.
The Last Tango in Paris presents us with is a terrible place nested in another terrible place. Bertolucci managed to turn the film set, one of the most important sites of contemporary cultural production, into a place of sovereign exception, a where, like a petty tyrant, he was able to operate at will under the pretense of “artistic freedom.” It is not at all strange that in a country as Catholic as Italy he was tried for obscenity and not for sexual and psychological abuse.
After the movie, Maria Schneider’s life took a turn for worse. The instant fame that came with her role as Jeanne led her to be type-casted as a sex symbol; understandably she refused to take roles that required nudity. By the mid seventies she was consuming great amounts of drugs and alcohol, she had two overdoses and a suicide attempt. By the eighties things seemed to get a better:
I was very lucky—I lost many friends to drugs—but I met someone in 1980 who helped me stop. I call this person my angel and we’ve been together ever since. I don’t say if it’s a man or a woman. That’s my secret garden. I like to keep it a mystery.7
Schneider finally found her locus amoenus, a circumstance which allowed her to devote a large part of her later career to improving the working conditions of women in cinema. She died in February 2011 of breast cancer. She was only fifty-eight years old.
- The Last Tango in Paris. Dir: Bernardo Bertolucci. 1972. ↩︎
- Admittedly, Bertolucci developed the script from his own sexual fantasies, specially one in which he would have sex with a beautiful stranger without ever knowing who she was. It is not hard to imagine how this scenario can degenerate from a wet dream to an abusive nightmare.↩︎
- Claretta Tonetti, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, 126. ↩︎
- The Last Tango in Paris. ↩︎
- Lina Das, “I felt raped by Brando,” The Daily Mail, July 19, 2007, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-469646/I-felt-raped-Brando.html ↩︎
- Ibid., 69 ↩︎
- Ibid., 69 ↩︎
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