How long does it take to perform a passionate scene in Last Tango in Paris?

"Last Tango in Paris" is a film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

Duration: 136 minutes

Synopsis

On the cold and gloomy streets of early spring, the exhausted Paul passes by the young and beautiful Jeanne. We met again in an empty apartment for rent. The two looked at each other, almost without saying a word, and soon began to make love crazily.

Jeanna went to the train station to pick up her boyfriend Tom, a young director. Jeanne happily ran over to hug and kiss Tom, but Tom was busy asking his companions to set up the camera. It turned out that he was going to film a program called "The Life of a Young Girl" for the TV station. He decided to use Jeanne as the protagonist and film their entire relationship until their marriage.

Jeanna often went to that apartment to have trysts with Paul. She saw that Paul was sad and lonely and wanted to know him, but Paul refused to tell her anything and did not want to know everything about her. So they made love like animals in an apartment with only one mattress, using howls instead of names. Paul was also very rude, and often had eccentric and sexually abusive behaviors. Jeanne was confused and sometimes angry and sad, but she gradually found that she fell in love with this mysterious and weird man.

Jeanna is still going to get married to Tom, and they go shopping for a wedding dress together. But Tom, who is immersed in fantasy, always cares more about his movie than the wedding. Jeanne, who was left out, rushed into the heavy rain in her wedding dress. Paul gently bathes the soaking Jeanne, but when she says she loves him and wants to live with him, he anally fucks her ferociously.

Jeanna and Tom started a normal life, but met Paul again on the street. He chases her, telling her about himself, hoping that Jeanne will come back to him. Jeanne told him it was over. The two chased each other to a hall where a tango dance competition was being held. When the last song played, Paul chased her to Jeanne's mother's home. He said he loved Jeanne and wanted to know her name. The gun in Jeanne's hand rang out, and Paul fell on the balcony. Under him was a gray and dilapidated Paris rooftop.

In 1972, the still very young Bertolucci filmed the film "Last Tango in Paris" which seems particularly vicious today. It took place in Paris, the capital of lust. An erotic story based on crazy sexual desire, passion and terrible loneliness and despair. In it, desire completely exposes its impossibility and the destruction that follows the impossibility.

The concept of the film is very strong, and it is clearly shown from the beginning. In the opening credits, two pictures by the British painter Francis Bacon appeared, of naked or clothed men, with their faces and body muscles horribly distorted, their faces blurred and curled up in pale, closed, tilted, empty and shrunken spaces. in indoor space. The brushstrokes in the picture are sharp and the colors are dripping with blood. In such references, the image points directly to the painful torture and bloody temptation of desire.

The film is extremely particular in composition and tone, fully demonstrating Bertolucci's poetic and symbolic temperament. Throughout the entire movie, the story takes place in two clearly divided spaces. One is that of Jeanne and Paul. The shots of the two accompanying them are almost all interior scenes, always under the backlight of the setting sun, with a glowing effect. The warm and erotic golden color clearly conveys a depressing and crazy hellish burning feeling in the dark and empty room. Another space is that of Jeanne and her fiancé Tom. This group of passages almost all takes place outdoors or in open spaces, but the sky in the city is always gloomy, cold and bright, and it seems that any hint of emotion will be lost in the cold air. Retracted helplessly. On a superficial level, these two spaces with very different colors can be seen as symbols of "marriage" and "love." For example, when Jeanne was choosing a wedding dress, she told Tom that marriage is "secular", like a repairman's work, daily repairs, and therefore something without secrets, while love is "two people coming to a secret." place, take off your work clothes, become a man and a woman again, and have sex.” For the only time in the film, two spaces and tones interpenetrate. That was the first shot in the last paragraph. Jeanne, who had decided to give up on Paul, was caught up by Paul on the street. In this exterior shot, we saw the sun for the first time, giving the characters and background a touch of warm color. In this shot, it is the only time that Paul talks normally and smiles normally. It seems to suggest a possible ideal combination of sexual desire and family life, but in fact it indicates the breakdown of balance, the leakage of secrets and destruction. the beginning of. And this is the secret involving desire.

Desire is always entangled with the keywords of body and nature. In the film, only childhood memories of close contact with nature make Jeanne's communication with the two male protagonists seem more real. Tom wants to turn his relationship with Jeanne into an image. Jeanne has been disgusted and deliberately performing. Only after returning to the country house and about to sink into memories, Jeanne accepted Paul's guidance. This is a rare poetic and refreshing section in the film. The sparse branches in the countryside make the light and shadow shine brightly in the darkness. The key is that it was in this "intimate contact" with nature that the body was absent. It only stayed in Jeanne's notebook, which was copied from the encyclopedia about "menstruation", "penis", etc. Definition of words.

The next shot immediately after this scene is the tryst between Jeanne and Paul. Surrounded by naked bodies, Paul also began to recall his childhood, American farms and cows, but this memory was soon blurred. Interrupted by traumatic memories, Paul returned to his arrogance and roughness.

Compared with the Jeanne and Tom passages, the real body just makes the intervention of nature and tenderness impossible, and desire reveals its connection with the other side of nature, that is, savage beastliness