Question
I was introduced to Marlon Brando through a great movie The Godfather. As far as my knowledge says the acting did by Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone was not just an acting a man do after reading a script, he lived that life and that’s why we could sympathise with a criminal.
If someone does such an important role in his life then how can he move on to a movie like The Last Tango in Paris which contains so much explicit scenes and so much adult scenes (I don’t want to use adult words because I just hate those things). You must have seen yourself that that movie contains so much of adult things that it takes our mind away from the main content, it never let us to sympathise with Brando. I’m not just talking only about that butter scene but all the other unclad scenes too.
How can a man who has done such a great movie like The Godfather , that ** You were my brother Charlie you could save me** dialogue of On the Waterfront can do a pornograhic movie like The Last Tango in Paris ? Why someone would want to play an addicts character who dies like an addict and not as a sober and lamenting addict? I know money can’t be behind this, there must be something else.
I doubt myself that it’s me who has not understood the real meaning the of that pornographic movie, because Marlon Brando will not do movie which doesn’t contain any special message about the life of a man whom no one sees but in fact really phenomenal. Therefore, I request you to please explain me the real message of The Last Tango in Paris in light of things I have outlined above.
Answer
The movie was initially X-rated and banned in some countries. Perhaps some make the distinction between porn and 'porn with a point', tho the point may be too small for others to readily see.
Here are two interesting review excerpts [I enjoyed reading them in full] that express the movie's trip to the dark side of human nature.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/last-tango-in-paris-1972
For the movie is about need; about the terrible hunger that its hero, Paul, feels for the touch of another human heart. He is a man whose whole existence has been reduced to a cry for help -- and who has been so damaged by life that he can only express that cry in acts of crude sexuality.
...The girl, Jeanne, is not a friend and is hardly even a companion; it's just that because she happens to wander into his life, he uses her as an object of his grief.
https://film.avclub.com/last-tango-in-paris-1798167521
He holds back nothing, and it’s enthralling, but sometimes hard to watch. So is the movie. Like his protagonist, Bertolucci wants to get down to the core of things, and that descent into the primitive sometimes feels as artificial as high-tea table manners. Schneider and Brando’s characters attempt to abandon their humanity, but their sex scenes feel raw and unreal, emptying out into a revelation of emptiness that itself feels a little empty. Like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs the year before, it offers a nihilistic vision of what it means to be human, using sex instead of violence to show the beastly impulses beneath our most refined feelings, and the way the beast within always wins.
On another note, there appears to have been fallout from the film:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Tango_in_Paris
Schneider declared in an interview that "Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48. And he was Marlon Brando!".[21] Like Schneider, Brando confirmed that the sex was simulated.[16] Bertolucci said about Brando that he was "a monster as an actor and a darling as a human being". Brando refused to speak to Bertolucci for 15 years after the production was completed. Bertolucci said:
Answered By - tblue
