Finding redemption in the folds of the tango.
The tango that Paul and Jeanne danced in the empty apartment on the late-night screen cut through the shell of modern civilization like a sharp ice knife. The peeling wallpaper and dappled light throw the two lost souls into an eternal fury. Bertolucci’s camera is brutal and almost holy, letting us witness not an orgy of lust, but the last self-help ritual of modern man in the abyss of loneliness.
The entire wasteland of the Beat Generation runs through Marlon Brando’s wrinkles, and his gesture of nibbling on butter is at once like a trapped animal and a saint. The empty room with no name is not a desperate attempt to remove the masks of the present generation. Inside the frantic intertwining of body language lies the ego, crushed by an alienated society, seeking to reorganize itself. When Jeanne’s skirt sweeps across the dusty floor, I hear the echo of the hollowing out of the post-industrial era.
But this soul surgery is ultimately too bloody. When violence breaks through the curtain of lust, the camera is no longer satisfied with recording, but becomes a complicit voyeur. Those intimate relationships that have been deconstructed into fragments both make people shudder at the abyss of human reality and prick the moral nerves domesticated by civilization. Like the windowpanes that Paul repeatedly wipes, we are always wavering between the clarity of desire and the haze of ethics.
The dance of tango is always accomplished in the tearing between advance and retreat. The tremor this movie gives the audience is similar to the tremor of Jeanne’s pupils when she finally pulls the trigger – at the tipping point between destruction and redemption, we finally see the reflection of our own souls, which are also covered with cracks. Perhaps true redemption does not lie in sewing up these wounds, but in learning to maintain the courage to dance in the midst of the brokenness. When the siren rips through the morning mist of Paris at the end of the movie, I suddenly understand: those cursed ones will eventually become our tickets to cross the void.
Write at the end:Living Sacrifice on the Altar of Art
When Bertolucci smeared Maria Schneider’s dignity with butter and lies, the history of cinema was branded with a wound that will never scab over. The so-called “improvisation” is the dismemberment of a young girl’s soul by the powers that be – the camera is the instrument of torture, the director is the executioner, and a public execution is carried out in the name of art.
Nineteen-year-old Schneider was pushed into hell without being informed of the details of the atrocities, and the “real” trembling on the screen was just the convulsions of a living sacrifice. The pathos in Brando’s folds is no longer profound, but it cannot hide the stench of this complicity: if art needs to destroy humanity as sustenance, it is a disgrace, not an honor.
Forty years later, Schneider’s indictment still hangs in the air: how many crushed bodies do we need to build a false altar of the Palme d’Or? When creators treat actors as removable props, the movie becomes a cover for power. True art should never be born out of the deceit of the powerful and the blood and tears of the weak.
TianaSkye
