Word: tangos
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None of Bernardo Bertolucci's previous films could so stir the psyche. Those works -- including one or two masterpieces -- were, as everyone said, lush and lyrical. They were emotive but they established an aesthetic distance that made them much less immediate than Last Tango...
...Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci abandoned adaptation and, on the surface, politics in favor of pure psychological portraiture on a personal, microcosmic level. What threatens the audience's complacency is such intensity on such a personal level. The audience dilutes the passions of the film by thinking of it only in terms of one more weekend's entertaining diversion. People can ignore the film in the same way that people who watch television news can ignore...
...indicator or Bertolucci's romantic ambivalence has always been his aesthete's love of the dance and the opera. The finest scenes in Before the Revolution took place at the opera; dance scenes of some sort have been prominent in most of his films. But nowhere except in Last Tango in Paris has the dance had such clear import. The tango at the end of the film is not just another Bertolucci dance -- it is a masterstroke. The tango, originally a spirited, emotional flamenco dance, is shown not just as the diluted ballroom style it is today...
...will still reach a much larger audience than it would have otherwise, and the clearest audience reaction will not be disgust or lust or even deep emotional involvement but rather the lack of impact that comes from viewing it only as a diversion. As a truly radical film, Last Tango in Paris is so far from the popular mind that it can have only subtle, nearly unconscious cultural influence, but it will influence other film makers, and Bertolucci, still a very young man, will make more films. Perhaps these later films will reach a public prepared by this film, less...
...Last Tango in Paris comes to Boston on April...