The Last Tango in Paris: subversive until when?

Curious is the word "subversive" that has been the adjective most applied to The Last Tango in Paris.

Curious because, 46 years ago, when the film was released, subversive sounded like a libertarian in Europe and a destroyer of good manners in Third World countries. Now, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, and on the director's death week, the film reappears in the media as offensive or disturbing.

But what was, at the time of the launch of The Last Tango in Paris, and is on the rise again, is a real inability to deal with sexual themes, an inability that never ceased to exist, but sounded a little tacky in "culturally correct" environment.

Paul and Jeanne met in a Paris apartment for rent in 1972. For some of these reasons that seem strange but certainly inhabit the minds of many, the 45-year-old man kisses the 20-year-old girl and initiates a sexual breakthrough that just cannot be considered rape by her agreement.

From there they begin a relationship with the condition, imposed by the American, that no names or personal details were revealed. The movie is so restricted in this respect that we never knew the name of Rosa's mother, Paul's wife who had just committed suicide.

If social intimacy does not appear, sexual intercourse is wide open, potty-mouth and dirty (in a good sense, we might say). Bertolucci leaves the actors free for improvisations, and what you see are moments of pure lyricism. Impossible to forget the metamorphosis lived by Paul, a violent man in a little boy sobbing next to the body of his dead wife.

There is also an emblematic scene that we might classify as prophetic, in which Jeanne voices against her fiancé Tom, who is filming her life, complaints about how she "can not stand being used" and even "feels raped", phrases that would be employed by the actress Maria Schneider later, in the real life.

The photograph of Vittorio Storaro and the music of Gato Barbieri frame this work of art.

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