Note on "Last Tango in Paris" and Pauline Kael's misreading of it

The film is profound social criticism that indicts certain forms that both the sexual revolution and feminism could be seen by 1972 to have taken. The opening images of Francis Bacon's paintings set the whole tone for the film: it is an exquisite expression of agony, not a liberation but a false one, not a joyful celebration but an inferno. And the film is precise in analyzing this contemporary condition. The Maria Schneider character represents a superficial feminism that the director, from his solid position as a left-wing Freudian, is perhaps a bit too vitriolic in exposing, but horrifying all the same. While the Brando character represents an American idea of authenticity (hence, method acting, hence Brando himself) and an idea of performing, in supposed authenticity, a 'liberatory' assault on memories of oppressive patriarchal and provincial ennui, is anatomized. A precise theorization of this in philosophy was best achieved a few years later with Michel Foucault's landmark History of Sexuality, vol. 1, which attacked the 'repressive paradigm' particularly with regard to sexuality. The film remains the most incisive critique of the culture of the 1970s. Alas, in our time it is easier to make an artwork that is critical than one that exemplifies possible ways of being we can affirm. That Kael and others would mistake it for that is perhaps excusable at the time, but reveals an ethical and political blindness that a few artists at the time, like Bertolucci, Godard (in La Chinoise), and Pasolini (in Teorema, Pigsty, and Salo), were able to see through. As far as social criticism is concerned, the often didactic Bertolucci in this film nails something at the heart of contemporary Western culture in a way that few films in the whole century that belonged so much to the art of the cinema. This must be considered, for the art form and its critics, a central part of their, our, vocation. Kael, who believed in reacting to films rather than engaging in sustained and informed reflection about them, just plain gets at wrong, like the horrible character played by Maria Schneider. Kael did not understand this film, but it understands people like her, who are, sadly, all too common. The film is in its way a demonstration refuting several positions. Seeing what is wrong with Kael’s reaction exposes, along with the madness of the characters, the error of an aestheticism that takes enjoyment for the criterion of value in works of art.

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From Pauline Kael's review, in "The New Yorker":

"Bernardo Bertolucci’s 'Last Tango in Paris' was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night 'Le Sacre du Printemps' was first performed—in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because 'Last Tango in Paris' has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the 'Sacre', the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism.”