Alpha Males in Film: Week 1 – Last Tango in Paris

Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando

Film: Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Lead Actor: Marlon Brando
Lead Actress: Maria Schneider
Key Alpha Trait: Psychosexual Dominance

Netflix subscribers can watch the movie here.

This film might as well be titled An American Seducer in Paris. Marlon Brando is a “made in America” white patriotic column of masculinity, at least until he breaks…but more on that later.

Summary:

Paul (Marlon Brando), a middle-aged American hotel owner mourning the suicide of his wife, meets a young engaged Parisian woman named Jeanne (Maria Schneider) in an apartment both are interested in renting. Paul and Jeanne proceed to have an anonymous sexual relationship in the apartment, and Paul demands that neither of them share any personal information, not even their names. The affair goes on until one day Jeanne comes to the apartment to find that Paul has, without warning, packed up and left.

Paul later meets Jeanne on the street and says that he wants to start anew with their relationship. He takes Jeanne to a tango bar and begins telling her about himself.

From the plot description alone, can you already see where Brando slipped?

In the beginning of the film, Paul and Jeanne meet while looking at the same apartment to rent. When she walks about the room, making small talk, glancing over at the brooding Paul in the corner of the room, one would think that Paul is an ass, a douche, or even creepy.

However, those knowledgeable in the tenets of game know that it’s sometimes better to simply shut up and let the sexual tension do the work for you. Paul is an older gentleman, handsome, an unforgiving presence in the room, and comes from some money. As a 19 year-old girl engaged to a man who is the complete opposite of him, it is only natural that she would be curious. So it came as no surprise to me when Paul picked her small, petite, feminine frame up in the air and over to the window where he had his way with her. Did she fight him at first? Yes. But does she begin to return his feelings of lust? Definitely.

From this first encounter, Jeanne sought to get to know Paul on a personal level. Perhaps she wanted a savior from her engagement, or perhaps she simply wanted her affair to have a name. We can never know what she really sought. But we know that Paul didn’t allow this.

As the film progresses, we follow Paul and Jeanne in their lives outside of the apartment. Paul begins to come off as not as alpha in his relationship with his now dead wife as he is with Jeanne. Prior to his wife’s death, she was involved in her own affair with a resident in the hotel Paul owns. A willing cuckold, Paul actually comes to a point where he is able to grieve for his wife’s lover. As her funeral day approaches, he breaks his mother-in-law’s vision of the idealistic daughter she believed she had. We also learn how Paul was a failed jack-of-all-trades who was courted by his French wife and wed himself into money.

It is through the perspective of their initial encounter in the apartment that we’re able to discern the possible motivations for his actions with Jeanne. With the death of his wife, Paul uses Jeanne to get revenge – but not against his wife, but himself. Since his wife basically saved him from a life of poverty, he placed her on a pedestal, which made him resentful of the fact that he could not be the master of the relationship. In fact, it was BECAUSE of his impotence in his marriage that his wife fled into another man’s arms. In Jeanne, he sees a chance to be in a relationship in which the woman sees and adores a man’s value, and not the other way around. It is this key issue that is his downfall, as he doesn’t realize that his relationship with Jeanne is not proof that he can have that relationship, but that it is his relationship as long as he maintains it.

Paul: Even if a husband lives 200 hundred fucking years, he'll never discover his wife's true nature. I may be able to understand the secrets of the universe, but...I'll never understand the truth about you. Never.

With Jeanne, the picture Bertolucci paints is the total opposite of Paul’s, but from the same frame of mind. Young and a daydreamer, she is the daughter of a French general who has had a charmed life. She is wealthy, engaged to an up-and-coming French director who is placing her in a new, groundbreaking TV program (reality TV, yeah this movie is dated). And last but most important, she is beautiful, with a petite yet curvaceous body (which Bertolucci makes sure you know), a girlish feminine face and features, and an expensive wardrobe which makes all of the above pop.

Yet, she is not the most bright shining flower, deeply unhappy with her life. Her boyfriend dotes on her, constantly compliments her, repeatedly tells her he loves her, and always makes sure she feels special, but he is completely unable to compete with the stoic image of her father. It’s rather nauseating for a man to watch, because you can simultaneously see her thinly veiled compulsion to keep her distance from her fiance and compare him to your own past beta behaviors. When she goes to the apartment, she finally finds a place where she is a woman completely under the spell of her man. She is is not doted after but beholden to Paul’s every whim and thought.

Paul: Well, first you have to take a hot bath and if you don't you're gonna get pneumonia. Right?... and then you know what happens? You get pneumonia...and then you know what happens? You die! And then, you know what happens then when you die? I get to fuck the dead rat!

The apartment is the place where they’re completely able to pursue the relationships that they wanted or want to have. By keeping their names unknown to each other, they shed their pasts, their insecurities, their family and social pressures, and all the baggage that comes with their identities, to simply be the man and woman they want to be. In the apartment, Paul controls the shots. He commands her in the bedroom and she obeys. Jeanne follows Paul’s lead, sexually degraded in every manner possible, pining for Paul as he cares for her afterwards. Without their names, they are themselves in every way they could have always been. It is why in the end, as Paul reveals his name and asks her to tell her his that the alpha wittles away.

I would be remiss to not touch on the controversy attached to this movie. Brando, Schneider, and Bertolucci ceased to be on speaking terms after the film’s release. Bertolucci had his civil rights revoked by the Italian government for promoting obscenity. Brando vowed never to open himself up like that again. Schneider was flung into international fame and drowned herself in drugs and sex. No one left this film the same, including the audience. Even today, critics are polarized in considering Last Tango in Paris to be trashy or brilliant.

As I believe art is to be utter truth recreated, and thus polarizing, I fall into the latter camp, and I’m not alone. The film director Robert Altman stated after seeing the movie, ”I walked out of the screening and said to myself, ‘How dare I make another film?’ My personal and artistic life will never be the same.” Mine neither. And if you watch the film, I guarantee you won’t be the same either.

Next time on Alpha Males in Film: Akira.