The legal proceedings surrounding Last Tango in Paris are well known, so it is not worth retracing the steps of a scandal that has proven to be a success of scandal. Today, the work, stripped of all controversy, appears more complex and at the same time simpler. In 1972, after the screening at the New York Film Festival, Pauline Kael wrote that the shock it caused in the American public was comparable to that caused by the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris in 1913. Kael's opinion ("a film that changed the face of an art") does not leave anyone indifferent, even if the comparison with Stravinsky is risky. Last Tango was much talked about, both for and against, citing Bataille and Céline, but it certainly represents a singular condensation of Bertolucci's themes. Two paintings by Francis Bacon - a man and a woman - accompany the opening credits and are placed side by side just before the story begins. The mature Paul, a desperate American widower for a few hours, meets the young Parisian Jeanne, daughter of a colonel and girlfriend of a filmmaker, in a rented apartment; here the two meet again for sex without inhibitions and an acquaintance without a past: they keep silent about their respective names, invent biographies and identities, uniting in various ways until feelings arise, destroying their fragile raft of shipwrecked people, and ultimately his life. The set of this disturbing concert, dominated by Barbieri's sax, replicates the bedroom of Agonia, the womb-house of Partner, the train compartment of Il conformista where Marcello and Giulia languidly flirt, while away the time that separates them from a double murder. Blue and red, exterior and interior, revolution and tradition, leaden Paris and sunny Rome dialogue on the theme of tragedy that in Ultimo tango is just around the corner. In fact, Paul, an inimitable and magnetic Brando who does not want love or to know about her outside the four walls, falls in love in the end, tearing down with his own hands the statue and the myth of himself as a cursed, cynical and subversive hero. He humiliates himself by following her on the street and makes a fatal mistake by wearing the colonel's cap, replacing the only true hero that Jeanne knows: her father.
