Last Tango, in Jakarta

It was Norman Mailer's book, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing that got me interested in watching Last Tango in Paris. And yesterday during lunchtime with my colleagues at Ratu Plaza, I happened to come across its DVD which I promptly purchased together with a couple of other titles (The Animatrix, Salvador and Memento). Armed with this delicious selection, I decided to avoid my clubbing friends that evening and have mini film-festival in my hotel room instead.

Norman Mailer devoted almost an entire chapter in the The Spooky Art to analyze Last Tango in Paris. After watching it last night, I know why he was obssessed with it: The screenplay could have been written by Mailer himself - vulgar, sexual, brutal and shocking even to the not-so-prudish among us.

Not that the movie contains excessive nudity or sex but its unabashedly sexual premise, content and dialogue test the boundary of what we would consider decent for a mainstream film, even by our present-day standards. One must remember this was a movie made in 1972 - more than thirty years ago; imagine the kind of reaction it would have brought to the audience then.

And even more shocking is the fact that the movie stars one of the biggest all-time Hollywood actors, the God among actors themselves: Marlon Brandon. And back in 1972 the aging Brando was already showing signs of that ballooning belly that would become his trademark in later years.

With Brando as a middle-aged American expatriate in Paris and a young 20-year old Maria Schneider as his sexual interest, director Bernardo Bertolucci cooked up a concoction that induces intestinal discomforts to those who are used to seeing Brando in "nobler" roles in films such as The Godfather, Apocalypse Now or even A Streetcar Named Desire.

Imagine him, in his usual mumbling style, spewing lines like: "Your happiness is my ha-penis". And that is only one of his more "poetic" utterances in the movie - many of these lines are actually improvised by Brando himself. The effect is as much shock as it would be to an UMNO politician discovering that God also mencarut.

A plot about a man (Brando) and a young woman (Schneider) - both not knowing each other's name or background - meeting daily in a bare Parisian apartment to have sex provides the framework for director Bernardo Bertolucci to dwell on his exploration of grief and the sexual enigma of man-woman relationship. Maria Schneider plays the role of an almost cerubic-looking young woman who is repulsed yet attracted to a sexually sadistic Brando who himself is haunted by the suicide of his wife and seemed not interested to pursue a relationship beyond a sexual one.

Those who have seen 9½ Weeks starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke would immediately recognize echoes of Last Tango in it. Though not as visually erotic or sleek as its successor, Last Tango in Paris has less pretensions and has a rawer edge to it. Critics in 1972 hailed it as a work of art and a pivotal event in cinema history. Both Brando and Bertolucci were nonimated for Oscars for their works in this movie.

I wouldn't go as far as claiming that this movie is a work of art, nor would I dismiss it as smut passing off as art; but I still found it engaging and Brando's characterisation of a tired sadomasochist, honest and believeable. Like street graffitis, simple naked honesty often borders on vulgarity. And vulgarity, stripped of all pretensions, sometimes works better than any other artistic device.

Last night safe in my hotel room, surrounded everywhere by the vulgarity that characterizes so much of Jakarta nightlife, I found Last Tango in Paris rather congenial entertainment, for a quiet Friday evening.