Review of Last Tango in Paris (1972) by Firas M — 15 Nov 2008

"I could comprehend the universe but I'll never discover the truth about you. I mean, who the hell are you?" says Brando to the corpse of his wife.

This movie is not about sex and, compared to what we get today, I'd say is pretty mild. True, 20 years ago it was a different story, when in the summer of my 15th year, while my family was at the beach house and I remained in the city because it felt grown up, I watched it with my best friend: we were the same age but she had already first hand experience and she thought she would show me what she was talking about! Well, of course, we focused on the educational content we could gather from it, but we did not understand that either, not really. We just left with this sensation of something almost unbearably intense that had happened in front of us.

Now I understand it is a movie about all of us:

Those of us who did as she did and killed the man because they could not want him outside of the empty apartment, dressed in normal clothes, with a normal house and a job, spoiled of all the mistery and the innefability that used to madden them so much ,throw them in despair.

Those who did not kill him and moved in with him only to discover he could not, anymore, inhabit the room of their fantasies.

Those who where just left with an empty apartment and never saw him again, apart in the shape of a ghost, at every corner of the street, till the day they died.

And even those poor souls who never had the luck of entering the empty apartment and look at it with comtept and fear and desire because something in them tells them they missed the crucial truth of a realtionship, that relationship where your name, education and bank account don't matter anymore and you bring only what is really important, the substance you are really made of.

As for me, I developed this mania of always going to look at empty apartment for rent.... just joking :-).