Self-Portrait of an Angel and Monster

The tango is a pantomime coitus for the camera.—Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, 1914

THE man is middleaged, leonine, ravaged. The girl is young, foxlike, insouciant. Total strangers to each other, they are inspecting an unfurnished Paris apartment that is for rent. Suddenly, the man scoops the girl up in his arms, carries her to the side of the room, then embraces and kisses her hungrily. He tears off her panties and has sex with her while still dressed and standing. The camera rests steadily on them as he thrusts her against the wall and she hitches herself up on him, clinging to his body with her knees. Finally, gasping and groaning, they tumble to the floor, roll apart and lie still.

Any moviegoers who are not shocked, titillated, disgusted, fascinated, delighted or angered by this early scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's new movie, Last Tango in Paris, should be patient. There is more to come. Much more. Bertolucci, whose political melodrama The Conformist was one of the most highly praised foreign films of 1971, has marshaled his opulent visual style to tell a stark story of sex as a be-all and end-all. For boldness and brutality, the intimate scenes are unprecedented in feature films. Frontal nudity, four-letter words, masturbation, even sodomy—Bertolucci dwells uncompromisingly on them all with a voyeur's eye, a moralist's savagery, an artist's finesse.

The movie, which will open in New York City on Feb. 1, is already a sensation and a scandal in Europe. It has been called a "pornographic Elvira Madigan" as well as a work of "constant beauty"; a piece of "talented debauchery that often makes you want to vomit" as well as an "authentic moral and psychological Apocalypse." Debates about its meaning and merits are raging among critics, intellectuals, theologians and editorial writers.

In Paris, people are standing in line for up to two hours at the seven theaters where Tango has been playing for a month. In Italy, the film ran into an initial snag with the board of censors, eventually was released for nearly a week last month, then was confiscated pending settlement of a citizens' suit complaining of "the obscenity of some sequences, particularly the scenes of carnal violence that last for several minutes and go beyond artistic necessity."

Amoral Charm. The U.S. distributor, United Artists, has allowed only one carefully timed public screening in the States—on the final night of the New York Film Festival in October. "That date," wrote Critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, "should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history. [Tango has] altered the face of an art form. This is a movie people will be arguing about for as long as there are movies." United Artists recently reprinted the whole of Kael's extraordinary rave as a double-page ad in the Sunday New York Times—the first salvo in what is rapidly becoming a barrage of high-powered promotion and publicity. By last week the advance sale of reserved seats for the New York run alone totaled nearly $50,000.