Word: tango
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Columnist Art Buchwald has a fascinating new theory about Last Tango in Paris: "It is really a simple, heartwarming film about two people trying to rent the same apartment in Paris...
MAYBE IT'S SOMETHING to do with films that get themselves known as legends, but L'Amour Fou and Last Tango in Paris are stunningly parallel, not least because both explore the definitions of love and sheer aggression in sexuality...
Rivette cannot rival the lush symmetry of Bertolucci's camerawork but his structure and psychological treatment make Tango, with its inconsistent plot and shallow characterization, seem even flatter by contrast. Rivette's psychology has its limits as well -- tendencies toward surrealism narrow its view, violence becomes stylized and unbelievable towards its end -- but the basic insights are sound. Sex is merely sketched in Rivette's work, but his actors have a greater sensitivity which produces a far more sensual result than Brando's mechanical and purposeless simulations...
...improvised segments can come up with is Brando's famous "everything outside is bullshit" line while Rivette's effort enriches the film with a ring of additional depth. The film-within-the-film approach in L'Amour Fou lacks the gimmickry and inside-joking of the similar segments of Tango: in Rivette's film the function is real, and Sebastien is even helped in his direction by seeing rushes of the television film...
...start off, they give you The Soldier's Tale. Now we all know that only in The Rite of Spring did Stravinsky truly succeed in his lifelong quest for a musical equivalent of Last Tango in Paris. But it seems to me that The Soldier's Tale comes much closer to bringing music into the twentieth century we know today, the century in which the common people--in the poems of Ezra Pound as well as the jungles of Indochina -- insist on asserting their rightful sway...