| | | "When You See a Love Story, it's Only a Movie. When You Feel it with Every Nerve in Your Body, it's a Masterpiece."
Features: DVD, Widescreen, French, Subtitled, Trivia, Notes, Uncut
Penetrate the moody, sensitive world of Last Tango in Paris, and prepare yourself for "the most controversial film of its era" (Leonard Mailtin). Nominated for two Academy Awards -- Best Director (Bernardo Bertolucci) and Best Actor (Marlon Brando) -- and exuding a sexual energy unlike any film before or after, this is the scintillating classic that shocked a nation...and "altered the face of an art form" (Pauline Kael).He (Brando) is a 45-year old American living in Paris, haunted by his wife's suicide. She is a 20-year old Parisian beauty engaged to a young filmmaker. Though nameless to each other, these tortured souls come together to satisfy their sexual cravings in an apartment as bare as their dark, tragic lives. Caught up in the frenzied beat of a carnal dance they cannot seem to stop, these unlikely lovers take their passion to erotic heights -- and depths -- beyond anything they could ever have imagined.
"Brando's eerily unaffected performance is one his most mesmerisng." Dan Lybarger, Nitrate Online
"...a dark, torrid masterpiece about love and grief." Jamie Russell, BBC
"The most powerfully erotic movie ever made!" Pauline Kael
"Shattering social and sexual conventions, Last Tango in Paris stands as one of Bernardo Bertolucci's finer achievements." TV Guide
"...a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film." Vincent Canby, The New York Times
Editor's Note
Originally famed for its sexual frankness, Bernardo Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS has managed to endure due to its sophisticated storytelling and brave lead performances. Marlon Brando incorporated details from his own life into the character of Paul, the globetrotting American who finally settled into a marriage and proprietorship of a fleabag hotel in Paris. But when his wife commits suicide, Paul goes into an existential tailspin. One day, while wandering through an apartment that is available for rent, he encounters Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a lovely Parisian girl (she's 20 to Paul's 45) who is also viewing the apartment. The two become intimate and have a heated affair, carried on without names, in the apartment where they first met. While Paul clearly hopes to forget about his wife, Jeanne is simply overwhelmed by her fiancé (Jean-Pierre Leaud, in a somewhat Bertolucci-satirizing role), a filmmaker who wants her to be his subject and inspiration. Nothing is taboo in their relationship, but confrontation comes when Paul breaks the spell of impersonality. Brando's monologue beside his dead wife has sent many a film student into a paroxysm of pleasure in this groundbreaking erotic drama from acclaimed director Bertolucci (THE CONFORMIST, THE LAST EMPEROR).
Plot Summary
Marlon Brando plays Paul, an American expatriate whose wife has recently committed suicide. Maria Schneider is Jeanne, a young Frenchwoman engaged to be married to an earnest young filmmaker. When they meet by chance in an empty Paris apartment, Paul and Jeanne embark on an intense sexual relationship that obliterates the outside world each is hiding from. Bertolucci and Brando created controversy with their poignant vision of desire inflamed by grief.
| Features | Widescreen Presentation | | Subtitles: English, French | | Interactive Menus | | 8-Page Booklet featuring Trivia, Production Notes and a Revealing Look at the Making of the Film | | Original Theatricl Trailer |
| Technical Info
|
Release Information
| | Studio: MGM |
| Release Date: 1/11/2005 |
| Running Time: 130 minutes |
| Original Release Date: 1972 | | Catalog ID: 102019 | | UPC: 00027616657022 | | Number of Discs: 1 |
Audio & Video
| | Original Language: French | | Available Audio Tracks: English, French | | Video: Color |
Aspect Ratio | | Anamorphic Widescreen 1.66:1 |
| Cast & Crew
| Awards |
Oscar (1974) | | | Bernardo Bertolucci, Nominee, Best Director | |
Golden Globe (1974) | | | Bernardo Bertolucci, Nominee, Best Director - Motion Picture | |
Grammy (1974) | | | Gato Barbieri, Nominee, Album of Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture | |
Golden Globe (1974) | | | Last Tango in Paris, Nominee, Best Motion Picture - Drama | |
British Academy Awards (1974) | | | Marlon Brando, Nominee, Best Actor | |
Oscar (1974) | | | Marlon Brando, Nominee, Best Actor in a Leading Role |
| Memorable Quotes| "I have a prostate like an Idaho potato." ---- "Get the butter." ---- Paul (Marlon Brando) to Jeanne (Maria Schneider) |
|
| | Professional Reviews | Chicago Sun-Times
"...The look, feel and sound of the film are evocative..." 08/11/1995 p.37Rolling Stone
"[Brando gives] one of his most ferocious and feeling performances." 02/19/2004 p.76-7 Entertainment Weekly
"Brando communicates a great sense of erotic abandon..." 07/16/2004 p.31 Premiere
"Brando is astonishing." 10/01/2004 p.114 Apollo Movie Guide 9 of 10
In the same year that Marlon Brando played Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's mafioso masterpiece The Godfather, he also took on the equally-challenging role of Paul in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 film Last Tango in Paris. Released to the public amidst all kinds of negative publicity regarding its seemingly meaningless sexual scenarios and brutal candour about casual and emotionless relationships, it went on to become an art-cinema classic. It's one of the most powerful films ever made. It is a film that was "shocking" at the time that it was first released, but watching it decades later, it doesn't seem particularly controversial when compared to more recent movies. However, it remains as compelling as ever...What makes Last Tango in Paris a timeless film about disenfranchised souls is the powerhouse performances from a still somewhat sleek Marlon Brando and his co-star, a Lolita-like vision of jaded youth, Maria Schneider. While they merely bring life to the vividly well-written characters and surreal, minimalist surroundings of the barren Paris apartment that they inhabit throughout the film, they do so with passionate fervour and heartbreaking sincerity...The film's perverseness is non-linear, with its sexual undertones concealed from the naked eye, much closer to the mentality of flicks like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape and Mike Leigh's Naked than it is to Adrian Lyne's 9 1/2 Weeks. In other words, there's more talking... and less fornication...Not only does Last Tango in Paris benefit from the sumptuous screenplay and enticing subject matter, but its true legacy is in the masterful performances... full of obsessed longing, utter disillusionment and sheer depravity. Brando is full of fire and fury, pulling the viewer into the world that Paul inhabits -- a place without rules, inhibitions, taboos, or even names, and in the end, a world devoid of meaning. - Patrick Byrne
Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" is one of the great emotional experiences of our time. It's a movie that exists so resolutely on the level of emotion, indeed, that possibly only Marlon Brando, of all living actors, could have played its lead...For the movie is about need; about the terrible hunger that its hero, Paul, feels for the touch of another human heart. He is a man whose whole existence has been reduced to a cry for help -- and who has been so damaged by life that he can only express that cry in acts of crude sexuality...A lot has been said about the sex in the film; in fact, "Last Tango in Paris" has become notorious because of its sex. There is a lot of sex in this film -- more, probably, than in any other legitimate feature film ever made -- but the sex isn't the point, it's only the medium of exchange. Paul has somehow been so brutalized by life that there are only a few ways he can still feel...What is the movie about? What does it all mean? It is about, and means, exactly the same things that Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" was about, and meant. That's to say that no amount of analysis can extract from either film a rational message. The whole point of both films is that there is a land in the human soul that's beyond the rational -- beyond, even, words to describe it...Faced with a passage across that land, men make various kinds of accommodations. Some ignore it; some try to avoid it through temporary distractions; some are lucky enough to have the inner resources for a successful journey. But of those who do not, some turn to the most highly charged resources of the body; lacking the mental strength to face crisis and death, they turn on the sexual mechanism, which can at least be depended upon to function, usually...That's what the sex is about in this film (and in "Cries and Whispers"). It's not sex at all (and it's a million miles from intercourse). It's just a physical function of the soul's desperation. - Roger Ebert
|
| |
|
|
|
