On the Death of Bernardo Bertolucci: The Eternal Tango

The music had died away for a long time, but the tango just did not end. It is the movie that followed Bernardo Bertolucci to his grave. Had to follow. A gigantic movie. A gigantic unpaid heap of guilt. In the beginning stood the utopia of absolute freedom, in the end the most brutal form of oppression: the woman's making available to a man.

The Marxist Bertolucci wanted in 1972, when shooting he was just 31 years old, with the "Last Tango of Paris" create a space that should be free of all social conventions and repressions. In his previous films, such as the activist-education novel "Vor dem Revolution" (1964) or the drama "The Big Mistake" about a follower of fascism from the year 1970, he told very concretely about overthrow and suppression. "The last tango of Paris" should now be extremely abstract. And at the same time extremely sensual.

The scenario: An elderly, almost faceless American and a young, almost historyless French woman dribbling drunk between tango-dancing couples on the dance floor and indulge in a rumble attic to the Eros. It is about the breaking of conventions, it is about the destruction of power structures. The American is played by the 48-year-old superstar Marlon Brando, the French by the 19-year-old unknown actress Maria Schneider - and that is unfortunately already a power gap that confirms rather than destroys the structures that are to be overcome.

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Then the scene with the butter: The American overpowers the Frenchwoman, lubricates her anus with a breakfast-mother, raping her while he puffs on her and makes Marxist maxims about bourgeois family structures and capitalist lies. Allegedly, the idea for the movie to a dream of Bertolucci to have sprung, in which he loves a strange woman in a strange city.

Seen in this way, "The Last Tango of Paris" offers interesting insights into the type of revolutionary Mackers, about leftism and sexism, about the eternal recurrence of the exploitative gender relations in their alleged overcoming. Pretty sick, pretty honest.

Subordinated to male lust and desire to show

However, the process of creating the scene was perfidiously dishonest: Bertolucci and Brando thought of it the morning before the shoot, but did not introduce Schneider. Allegedly, Bertolucci wanted to capture their authentic shock about improvised (simulated) rape. Schneider was made available as an actress, she was subordinated as a woman of male lust and desire to show.

In 2013, Bertolucci had revealed the history of a public event in front of the camera, in 2016, the statements made a larger round around the world, the actress Jessica Chastain called for a boycott. In the #Metoo year of 2018, the style of the shoot of "The Last Tango of Paris" was then cited as a prime example of the firmly in the movie firm booked sexism. Schneider died in 2011, Bertolucci rightly guilty.

He belonged to a generation of highly politicized directors who wanted to name and change social conditions in filmmaking, such as the five-hour revolutionary drama "1900" of 1976. And he belonged to a generation of self-discovery hunger-driven Auteurs who psychoanalytically became the core of For example, in the operatic incest drama "La Luna" of 1976, that behind the progressive intention often a repressive spirit came to light, just as in the butter scene, Bertolucci's films often lent a truth on a second level. A cruel truth.

Small chamber play, great art

Abbitte had not been able to afford Bertolucci at Schneider before her death. But in the year of her demise, he began, after eight years, the titan of the big-budget European arthouse cinema, which had produced monumental productions such as "The Last Emperor" or "Sky Over the Desert" in the eighties and nineties illness-related break the work on a small Italian Kammerspiel. It was his last film: "Me and You," the story of a 14-year-old and his drug-addicted half-sister, who are freed from all social constraints in a cellar hole.

In many ways, the film is a reflection of "The Last Tango": the narrow space, its own rules, the dedication of two people, faith a private kind of utopia. And in a central scene is also danced very idiosyncratic, to an Italian version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity".

There is so much tenderness in the room as in perhaps no other movie by the socialist who died on Monday at the age of 77. Bertolucci, that was not just the young man with the butter. But also the old dreamer.