Bernardo Bertolucci – Last Tango in Paris (1972)

“Fucking God!”

A train clatters across a bridge. A man holds his hands over his ears and shouts. He starts walking. He seems both anguished and sorrowful. A young woman, wearing a hat adorned with two flowers, passes him. She notices him, but keeps walking.

Jeanne (Maria Schneider) rents an apartment in an old hotel. It turns out the previous tenant, Paul (Marlon Brando), is still living there. The apartment is nearly empty. A broken cabinet here, an object draped in fabric there. They get to know each other, Jeanne and Paul. They talk, they have sex. Paul wanders, gliding through doors as if searching for something within his sorrow, lost in his drifting thoughts.
This — their meeting place — is a vacant room and a mattress. An improvised space, a stage.
No names, no past.
What is the price of loss and the pent-up feelings that follow — anger, grief, or love?
Sex. Madness. Obsession.
They talk, tell stories, argue.

“You’re all alone. You won’t be free of that feeling of being alone... until you look death right in the face...”

A woman cleans a bloodstained bathroom. Paul’s wife had killed herself days earlier. The woman speaks. Paul listens. A glass partition separates them. The scene is beautifully lit.

“Fake Ophelia drowned in the bathtub,” Paul says, sitting beside her bed before leaving.

Later, a dance hall. Jeanne and Paul. A few drinks and a drunken, pity-soaked argument between two people, one who wants and one who doesn’t. Much like elevators going up and down — it hasn’t yet been decided who’s in the elevator and who’s running the stairs.

Bertolucci’s film is like a shattered mirror or a puzzle where few, if any, pieces still fit. It’s like a prose poem, full of the mundane, the trivial, and the details.
If someone claimed there was nothing in triviality, I’d recoil at the thought.

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