For a long time, I avoided watching Last Tango because people told me it was grim, sadistic, and bleak. One colleague warned me, “Sabrina it ain’t!” Originally Tango was rated X. Everyone knows about the infamous butter/anal sex scene, but what grabbed my attention was the dialogue, and the black humor of the screenplay.

Brando’s childhood reminiscence scene. Unsurprisingly, it deals with cow shit and spittle. Screencaps by Linnet.
Spoilers and adult content ahead.
Humor, you ask? Well, yes. Very grim humor, mind you. It’s there in Paul’s lines when he tells Jeanne that in ten years, she’s going to be playing soccer with her tits, or ruefully notes that he himself has a prostate the size of an Idaho potato. He pretends that he’s going to eat a dead rat “with mayonnaise,” and as he leaves the room with it, he throws back a parting shot at the disgusted Jeanne: “I’ll save you the asshole.”
When they’re in bed together, Jeanne pretends to be Little Red Riding Hood:
Jeanne: What strong arms you have!
Paul (in gruff voice): The better to squeeze a fart out of you!
Jeanne: What big hands you have!
Paul: The better to scratch your ass!
Jeanne (sliding her hand beneath the covers): What a lot of fur you have!
Paul: The better for your crabs to live in.
Lines like these reveal Paul’s character–mordant, earthy, world-weary, still capable of pleasure and even tenderness, but underneath that strange combination of animal brutishness and verbal facility, he’s a tortured soul. It is with good reason that director Bertolucci rolls the opening credits over two portraits of agony by Francis Bacon.

Credits with Francis Bacon paintings: portrait of Lucien Freud, and study for a portrait (Isabel Rawsthorne). Click for source.
In a lighter vein, there’s the scene where Jeanne’s boyfriend, an aspiring young film director with amusing “auteur” pretensions, takes her into the garden of her childhood home along with his motley “crew” of camera and sound men. They discover a group of little boys taking a shit in the bushes, and when challenged, the lads make a run for it, with the posse of dutiful cameramen in hot pursuit…
Jeanne’s character is not as well defined as Paul’s, but that makes sense because she is so young. She’s confused about love and sex and men. Yet she has her own ideas and opinions. She’s not a mere cipher, and she doesn’t always put up with Paul’s bullshit.
Paul: And where do you think I’m going to be in ten years?
Jeanne: In a wheelchair?
There’s another funny scene where Jeanne’s cinéaste boyfriend Tom proposes to her in front of some sort of canal lock with rushing water below them. He puts a life preserver around her, and after she finally says yes, he joyfully casts it into the water. The camera focuses on the life preserver as it sinks dolefully into the depths.
In spite of its explicitness about sex, many critics contend that the film is not about the erotic, as Pauline Kael thought. Although the sexual magnetism of both Brando and his 22-year old co-star (Maria Schneider, who recently died at 58) is much in evidence, most of the sex scenes are not pornographic, in the sense that they do not inspire lust.
The film addresses Paul’s pain, and how he uses sex, instead of drugs or alcohol, to dull that pain. Bertolucci has stated, however, that he based elements of the film on his sexual fantasies. On a second viewing, certain moments are undeniably erotic. Yet melancholy and death are always near.

One of the erotic (but also funny) moments, which Bertolucci films in a golden light. This is the most we ever see of Brando naked.
From Jeanne’s perspective, it’s easier to affirm that the story is about sex. She’s twenty, bourgeoise, naive. Viewers often express disbelief that a beautiful young woman like Jeanne would willingly meet a balding, middle-aged, pudgy man for anonymous sex. But this is Brando. And Paul’s character draws much from Brando’s film and real-life personalities (he’s a failed boxer… his French isn’t too bad… he’s lived in Tahiti…).
Where an older, more experienced woman might have no use for this charismatic loser, Jeanne falls under his spell immediately, and finds herself unable to break away. She feels a powerful sexual infatuation. Once she tastes the wild, boundary-pushing, transgressive, passionate sexual experience that Paul offers, she can’t stop herself. She recognizes that Paul is bad for her, but she keeps coming back for more.

Brando’s beautiful shoulders, beautiful backside, and a slight spare tire… the shaving scene is typical of the film’s realism. Jeanne’s pubic hair is often on display, a fact which no doubt contributed to the original X rating.
That’s why I don’t feel the disgust that many others do at the way Paul treats her. There’s a slight ambiguity about consent in some of the sex scenes, especially the butter scene, where Jeanne weeps. But from the first encounter, Jeanne never tells him to stop. She’s willing to experience what he’s dishing out and she’s not truly afraid that he’ll hurt her (in fact, Paul is far more scary and cruel when he interacts with his mother-in-law).

The butter scene is hard to watch, not because it involves anal sex but because of Paul’s brutal language and behavior. He forces her to repeat what he’s saying, some twisted catechism about the church and the Holy Family.
The “demeaning” aspect is more to do with Paul’s shocking language than with his physical brutality. In fact, he can be tender, as in the scene where he bathes Jeanne after she arrives soaked to the skin. The deliberate de-romanticizing of their relationship is counteracted by their moments of intimacy, though Paul usually reacts to these by reverting to corrosive scatological jokes.

Paul has Jeanne stick two fingers up his arse while he recites a disgusting fantasy about sex with a farting, dying pig.

In her wedding dress, Jeanne runs through the rain to the flat. Paul carries her over the threshold in a parody of marital bliss, then bathes her.
Paul’s agony and his need to dominate a female sexual partner is fully explained. He meets and seduces Jeanne immediately after discovering the body of Rosa, his suicidal wife, in a bathtub full of blood. In later scenes we learn that he passionately loved the beautiful Rosa, but she was a serial cheater who (more or less) gouged his heart out and served it to him on a stick.
The decrepit flat where he meets Jeanne is a sealed bubble, and even in a sense a comforting womb, where he can regress to an animalistic or infantile state, losing himself in his body, hooting like an ape, and shutting away the outside world. It’s ironic that Paul’s safe space is the space of experimentation and danger for Jeanne. But by the film’s end, the bubble collapses. Paul tells Jeanne:
I’m forty-five, a widower, I’ve got a little hotel, it’s kind of a dump, but it’s not completely a flophouse. And, I used to live on my luck, and then I got married, and my wife killed herself. What the hell, I’m no prize…

“I’ve got a prostate the size of an Idaho potato, but what the hell, I’m still a good stick man even if I can’t have children…” The ideal partner for a 20-year old!
After this self-revelation, the spell is broken. The tango scene for which the film is named takes place in the outside world, as Paul attempts to refashion their anonymous relationship into something workable outside the bubble. The artificiality of the tango dancers, and his own grotesque dance with Jeanne, points toward his inevitable failure.

Paul’s valedictory to the tango judges is hilarious. Look at the expression of the dancer on the right.
The moment of truth comes when Paul follows Jeanne to her apartment even though she shouts “NO!” at him over and over. Ironically, now that he is a lover in earnest, he crosses the line into creepiness. Her explicit lack of consent means nothing in the face of his newfound love, his desire to reveal himself at last. He forces his way into the flat where she lives with her parents. And where her father’s service revolver still sits in a drawer.
It may have been Roger Ebert who said that one or the other of these two had to die. I’m glad it wasn’t Jeanne, for in the hands of a lesser director, she surely would have been the victim. And I think this is a truly great film.
I saw “Le dernier tango à Paris” when I was about 25 years old with my ex-husband, i guess.We knew about the brutal sex scenes but we wanted to see what it really was about (“un classique”). I remember that I found it quite depressing, so sad (not speaking about the sex relation between Brando/ Schneider).
I hated the “butter scene” because it really loooks like a rape scene – and that’s how Maria Schneider talked about it years and years later.
But the whole movie is not just that scene,…
I never regret my choice to watch it so young. It’s a movie to be seen but I feel too sensitive now that I’m older to watch it again….
Thanks for these comments. I agree that it is a very powerful film, and one which evokes strong reactions. I’m glad I finally watched it.
Sadly, Maria Schneider had bad memories of the making of this film (she recently passed away, quite young still). Brando too felt that he was somehow being exploited by the director and said that it was emotionally grueling. But he was the star and they both could have been more considerate of young Ms. Schneider.
I still have to watch it. I am still thinking about it 🙂
If you do, I’d like to know your reaction!
I certainly will 🙂
I was 19 or 20 when I saw this, I think it was at the Odeon Leicester Square, but it may not have been. What I do remember is how much it depressed me. At that age the idea of a fascinating older man was, in its self, all I needed to draw me in, that man being Brando clinched it. But the beauty of some of the shots (only some, a lot hurt my brain with their hurtful cleverness) never detracted from the empty feeling, and the deep suspicion that this was all there was. I’m not sure I could watch it again.
Your piece is, as always, good and well considered; one picture especially caught my eye and made me unexpectedly happy. The shot of the metro on the bridge, I remember the old carriages, first class with padded seats, second class wooden slated ones, and the shiny brass latches on the doors. I remember standing like an idiot, waiting for them to open automatically, the way they did on the Tube. Then a large arm reached down, over my shoulder, lifted the latch, the doors opened and people shoved past me onto the platform.
Thank you for that, memory is an odd thing.
What a wonderful story about the train! Yes, there is definitely an emptiness to the film, a terrible sadness. But I had the feeling that Jean’s character was going to be OK.
Ok, I must watch this. You had me at ‘butter’ and ‘Brando’ 😉
I wonder what you’d think of it! You would appreciate the humor, which is an aspect of the film that most people don’t even mention.
I’m really keen to see it now – might pop over the local video store. German = old school 🙂
hm… i’ve always felt this is not my cup of tea, one of those things that i could read but seeing it would be too depressing… not an unusual story to expel sadness and hurt in verbal or other kinds of violence and maybe i feel other stories would be more meaningful I did watch Eyes wide shut, more than once and found it interesting but this is a bit like i feel about Revenant, the movie.. interesting idea and worth it but i sort of prefer not to watch…
I haven’t seen Eyes Wide Shut or Revenant. Maybe I should watch the former because the sexual aspect of Tango is what interested me. Not the acts themselves so much as the way sexuality is presented and what it means for the characters.
I have seen the trailer for Revenant a couple of times, and there’s not much in it to attract me. Though there IS a rumor that Leo gets sexually assaulted by a bear, LOL…
Wow, it’s been a long time since I saw that movie. I would have been 19 or 20 — saw it as part of a film course in university. In the “Freudian / Lacanian” part of the course, I think.
I don’t even remember what I thought of it. I grew up in a small northern town, and I saw so many weird, arty, mind-blowing movies that first year of university… This was just another one.
Still tend to prefer “art” movies over big Hollywood productions now, though.
How interesting, I wonder what a Freudian interpretation would be… maybe that Jeanne was seeking a father figure? But I don’t think that’s right.
Many thanks for the info we were trying to find this while we were checking the internet and also your website showed up– Many thanks
You’re very welcome. Glad you enjoyed it.