Word: tango
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...farce, tragedy or bathos? Maria Schneider, 22, star of Last Tango in Paris, signed herself into a psychiatric hospital while filming Carlo Ponti's The Babysitter in Rome. Not for treatment, but simply to be with her inseparable companion of the past two years, Joan ("Joey") Townsend, 28, the daughter of ex-president of Avis Robert Townsend, who wrote Up the Organization. Joan had been picked up that morning at Fiu-micino Airport, babbling irrationally. On learning that her friend had been taken to a psychiatric hospital, Maria rushed to join her. The following three days were macabre. Paparazzi...
EMMANUELLE TRIES to make the long climb from pornography to pornographic art and gets tangled up in some embarrassing place in between. At first this big budget, soft-core, high-class porn flick seems to be just a confused attempt to rival Last Tango in Paris as a sophisticated X. rated movie--that the ads promise "will change the meaning of X." Not content with just visual eroticism, director Just Jaeckin tries to convince us that he's making a serious philosophical statement on human sensuality. He fails not so much because he lack the originality...
...raising his eyebrows. After a minute he too heaves out of his seat and wooden faced, strides manfully down the aisle picks up Emmanuelle and carries her into the bathroom to more incredulous laughter from the audience. What follows is a direct steal from the first scene of Last Tango, its perhaps reverent plagiarism ruined as an erotic image by the fact that Emmanuelle is sitting on the sink in what must be pure pain...
...terrific publicity campaign has turned Emmanuelle into a box office success rivalling that of Last Tango, by promising racy respectability ("X you can take your wife to") and a certain intellectual stimulation ("The most sensual part of your body is your mind). The poster earnestly assuages embarrassment and guilt, promising that "after the film is over you don't find yourself making a hasty departure while scrupulously avoiding eye contact." The great success of these ploys, along with the material opulence and glibly amoral tone of the film, is a clue to what the movie was meant to accomplish. Jaeckin...
...Last Tango in Paris. This has suffered in the year and a half since it came out, inevitably, after the fuss Pauline Kael generated, and the erratic nature of her criticism since then. That famous "it has altered the face of an art form" review was almost a watershed in her work. But the problem was that she shifted the emphasis the wrong way--toward sex, and played into the hands of the newsmagazines who turned it into a lurid porno flick at worst and a "shockingly honest" film at best, though they would have done that anyway. In fact...