Tango

“Last Tango in Paris.” (1973) The final devastating moments when age and need, once revealed, are too much for the female protagonist, despite Paul’s (Brando) insistence, all along, that names, truth, narrative are not valid, or particularly revelatory. Paul insists on their relative anonymity in their shared apartment because he knows what the world is: convention would limit their exchange, and trivialize it, and render everything “less,” including his existence. There is no “truth” to bodies and lust, just the expansiveness of feeling each other up. Slowly but surely, though, the young woman starts to introduce facts into their exchange–Paul is gaining weight, etc–because she is cinema verite itself and won’t be shut out of the world of facts. Eventually, when she finds out the truth–that Paul is an aging petit bourgeois, all the things he knows about himself but out of love and kindness never shared; what would be the point–and he is as needy as anyone else, she engineers a final rejection to free herself from the truth she once sought: his death. I did not know what the film meant until I, too, became Paul, another of time’s energetic ruins, and I can only imagine what it meant to my father who, most weekends, took my brother and I to see foreign films. My father adored Maria Schneider, Paul’s happiness and his ruin, particularly when she appeared, with Jack Nicholson, in “The Passenger”: All those long shots, all that white space. I wonder if, to him, the town Nicholson showed up in looked like his ancestral home, Barbados, and I wonder, too, if Maria looked like some version of the women he loved: foreign in spirit, fun loving, confused as to why he wanted to shut the world out as long as he could, and did.