Marlon Brando by Richard Schickel

Author:Richard Schickel [Richard Schickel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / General
ISBN: 9781612305622
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2012-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

Act Three

The year of his redemption and reintegration was 1972. There was The Godfather, of course, the culmination of his career as a character actor. His Don Corleone was old and sweet and deadly - cunning in both senses of the word. He deserved the second Oscar he was awarded for the performance, and show biz deserved the fake Indian princess he sent to pick it up for him. In that same year, however, there was also Last Tango in Paris. Pauline Kael may now regret announcing that the date it premiered at the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972, “should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 - the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed - in music history.” Today Tango seems more a curiosity than a precursor to anything very much. But as a date in the history of modern celebrity, why, yes, it has a certain resonance. Bernardo Bertolucci, who both wrote and directed the film, said at the time that he liked to create characters based “on what the actors are in themselves,” instead of asking them “to interpret something preexistent.” This, after his years in the wilderness, was something Brando needed, and something his reputation needed, too. Time - long past time - to go pearl diving again.

Watching the movie again, years later, one sees, as one did not amid the hoopla attendant on its initial release, that its sole significant business, the place where its vitality now resides almost exclusively, lies in this opportunity it provided Brando. Le Sacre du Printemps, indeed! The thing is the star vehicle to end all star vehicles. Yes, it aspires to something more, to some pure and daring statement about the relationship between man and woman. But no, on that level, its intellectuality is strictly soft-core.

The story has a nameless man and a nameless woman (she is played by Maria Schneider) meet in an apartment both are thinking of renting. Having checked it out, he falls upon her, and she, in the modern manner, accepts him as a quick, brutal fuck. Thereafter they meet for increasingly vivid fornication (the classic porn structure is followed with the domineering male and the submissive female isolated and thus freed from all restraint, which permits escalation in the intensity and daring of their sexual feats). Outside the apartment we see that she is involved with a young filmmaker, who is recording their affair (he will eventually propose marriage) and her biography for a documentary. He wishes to impose the spurious order of art on life. The Brando character’s wife, it is revealed, has just committed suicide, and that has summoned both reminiscence and remorse on his part - along with the need for the affectless sanctuary the apartment and the girl afford. Eventually, and banally, there is a role reversal. He proposes a conventional living arrangement to her, just as she decides that she has got all the good she can out of the degradation (in slavery there is freedom, as the cliché goes) he has imposed on her.

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