The third anniversary of his death is as good a time as any to say this: there is not a performance in the history of cinema that is as raw as Marlon Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris. He may have changed the acting paradigm twenty years earlier, but Last Tango is where he makes his final, definitive, most revolutionary statement, a statement so powerful that even Brando himself could not endure it.
Director Bernardo Bertolucci seems to set Brando up for this from the beginning, treating his leading man less like the best actor of his generation and more as a postmodern text. Bertolucci fashions a pastiche of Brando by mixing elements from his real life, his screen career, and his character's life to create a fourth person who towers above all three to form the totality of "Marlon Brando" the icon.
In the film, Brando's character is described as "a boxer, a bongo player, a revolutionary." At first, this confounds the viewer: is the audience supposed to believe that one man is really all of these things? But then it becomes clear: Brando portrayed failed boxer Terry Molloy in On the Waterfront, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in Viva Zapata!, and Brando frequently played bongos during his talk show appearances. At this moment, it becomes clear that Bertolucci demands the viewer to look upon Brando's character as more than simply the character Paul; we are to look at Paul as "Brando," and this is reinforced by Paul's insistence that "no names," no personal information be shared during his affair with Maria Schneider. Therefore, we seldom hear Paul referred to as "Paul," and, left with no meaningful character name to cling to, the audience relies on the only name they know: Brando.
This is all done to set up Paul's revelatory monologue in the middle of the film, in which he talks about his painful childhood on a farm in the Midwest. It's the one moment in which the incredibly private Paul reveals anything about his past to Maria Schneider, but the viewer doesn't need to listen to it very long before s/he realizes that s/he is listening to the autobiography of Marlon Brando, and at that moment, we are locked in a cinematic experience unlike anything we have ever seen before. Character, actor, and legend collide in a moment of supreme aesthetic truth. Finally, after years of portraying bottled-up men, Brando, perhaps the most private celebrity of his time, is letting us in, opening his cage to expose a part of his feral soul.
Bertolucci's film is very much a film of deconstruction, a story of effacement. Desire, sexuality, language, identity, and even cinema itself are all scraped bare in the film, but nothing articulates this more than watching the Method Man eviscerate himself and his career onscreen. There are no masks, no tricks, no dramatic fakery; there is almost no performance, or at least this is a performance in which the audience cannot tell performance from reality, verisimilitude from actuality. This does not seem like the Brando only his friends knew; it seems like the Brando no one knew, the wounded man he never dared show to anyone. It is as though the artifice of filmmaking finally provides him with the freedom he'd always sought to be himself completely: unhinged, damaged, human.
Or so one would hope. While this experience had the potential to be therapeutic, it turned out otherwise. Brando later described the experience as "emotional rape" and didn't appear in another film for four years. He felt Bertolucci manipulated him, and he vowed that he would never expose himself in that way onscreen ever again. And he never did. He never even seemed to try. After Last Tango, acting is nothing but a big joke to Brando. Late in his life, he even hosted a cynical documentary on acting he called "Lying for a Living." Therefore, the film acts as an emotional peep show, providing us with a brief glimpse into Brando's tortured soul before he slams the door shut forever.
It is this knowledge of what this film means in the context of Brando's career that makes his death on the balcony one of the most tragic death scenes in cinema. Brando's death scene represents something more than the death of the character Paul and something less than the death of Marlon Brando. It is the death of "Brando" the icon, the voice of a generation. It is the death of one man's vulnerability. When his vacant eyes stare into the camera, growing more and more hollowed out with each passing frame, it is as though the audience is watching him close himself off forever. His eyes tell us the sad truth: there is nothing left of him to see; he is empty.
It's hard to imagine a single actor working today who is capable of this, not in terms of talent, but in terms of mystique. No one today is as private as Brando, no one has as mythic a career, and no one has the guts to risk his/her career on a role so emotionally naked. Brando himself could only muster the strength to do it once, and in doing so, brought on his own undoing.
For Jim Hosney -- the kind of teacher I'll always try to be.