Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  Nothing could have been farther from reality, however—not only because, as Brando knew, the truth is more elusive than fiction, but also because of his legendary passion for privacy. Indeed, Last Tango deliberately fictionalizes Bertolucci’s situation, through its parody of the voyeuristic filmmaker. Jeanne’s intended, Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is the director’s smug alter ego, always accompanied by a crew as he makes his movie, Portrait of a Girl, for television. The obvious irony is that Tom, the proper bourgeois, hasn’t a clue about the depths of erotic satisfaction Jeanne is experiencing in the bare apartment. This is the point: how little we know about others. Similarly, Paul is not the only one barred from understanding his wife’s suicide—so are Rosa’s mother (Maria Michi) and her secret lover, Marcel (Massimo Girotti). How little we know others is only surpassed, Last Tango suggests, by how little we know ourselves.11

  That is why asserting that Brando had divulged who he was, was presumptuous. Like Jeanne, viewers were asked to surrender to a mystery, the potential for being intimate without the most basic information. Not that knowing someone is necessarily revealing, as Paul’s marriage confirms. More comforting and titillating for viewers is accepting Bertolucci’s suggestion that they were now accessing memories and fantasies Brando had denied probing journalists for years. Brando was undoubtedly aware of what he was doing. He toys throughout, as does the film, with a dilemma that is foregrounded by cinema: Is anyone what he seems or hopes to be? As well as any film actor, Brando understood what writer Max Picard (The Human Face was in his collection) called the “emptiness” of “the cinema face.” This is contrasted with the “real” human face, which expresses its divinity in smiling. It was a trap, Brando once said, for an actor to mistake himself for the image projected on screen.12 Last Tango is preoccupied with the fabricating power of film, exposing its own inventions while demanding our belief—a sadomasochistic rhythm replicated in Paul’s treatment of Jeanne. For viewers and the Jeanne character alike, arousal demands complete submission to another’s fantasy.

  More than is typical, Last Tango claims its power to create reality. Thus, in the bath, Jeanne says Paul looks like “a pimp,” and in the very next scene he becomes one, pursuing, at the behest of a whore, a customer who has abandoned her. The first scene also confirms this cinematic power when the couple has sex beneath Paul’s camel-hair coat, as he engulfs Jeanne’s vitality to compensate for his brush with death. The filmgoer, like the bourgeois woman, is shocked by his aggressive move to possess her but accepts being transported into a world of fantasy. Because this is not pornography, there will be no adherence to convention. The power of Brando’s Paul is the power of the actor: inherent in gestures, the more unexpected the better. He shuts the door abruptly, leans against it thinking, walks slowly toward the woman, every step a threat. His face is a mask of determination as he takes her hat, tosses it on the floor, and carries her to the window. They are strangers, but he has no fear she’ll scream or run. He has read the situation correctly: youthful profligacy and independence. He knows the spell cast by a man this sure of himself. She will accept the pleasure of his capacity to surprise or shock her; no one has treated her like this before. Hence the significance of the notorious sodomy scene, where Paul pulls Jeanne’s pants down, moistens her anus with butter, and climbs on top of her fully clothed, pinning her roughly to the floor. It is like a punishment as he penetrates her against her protests, demanding that she repeat an obscene diatribe against that ultimate bourgeois institution, the family. Yet the exchange is gratifying to both of them. Her tears are an expression of rage over how he has stripped her and revealed her desire for domination through her orgasmic response to it.

  Last Tango evokes the ultimate male fantasy in portraying male dominance as the realization of female desire.13 This is not the place to debate the relative success of feminist challenges to that dominance. But it’s worth noting that Brando was familiar with the classic arguments, citing in an interview the array of taboos designed to oppress and exclude women—extending from “so-called primitive” to “modern societies”—which he attributed to men’s awareness of their overwhelming dependence on women.14 Male dominance in Last Tango is an ideology—that is, a myth made true by people behaving as though it is.

  Paul’s effort to keep things risk-free—no names, commitments, past or future—reveals just how risky satisfying sex is. The risk they take comes from gratifying long-buried impulses. Temporary, dilapidated, infested with rats, the apartment is the closest thing in highly cultivated Paris to a state of nature. But Last Tango understands how indebted any state of nature is to culture and its rituals. Paul and Jeanne engage in various domestic rites at the apartment, from his shaving and her applying makeup to their arranging furniture and engaging in pillow talk. The tango itself, Paul explains to Jeanne during the contest at the dance hall, is “a rite.” Dwelling on doors and doorways, the film highlights the major ritual transitions—mourning and marriage—faced by its protagonists. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Paul comes from death to declare his truths to Jeanne on her way to a wedding. In one scene, he carries his young lover in her wet wedding dress over the threshold; in the next, he eulogizes his wife’s flower-laden corpse. Paul presides at two ritual occasions, over two white-gowned women he never really possessed. His wife’s affair with hotel regular Marcel and Jeanne’s violent repudiation of him demonstrate the illusoriness of Paul’s mastery.

  Because Paul embodies male dominance, his death represents its destruction. But the bleakness of the conclusion confirms our attachment to the myth—and its tenaciousness. Despite a plot that shifts constantly from the rental apartment to the distinct worlds of Paul and Jeanne, there is only one moral when it comes to sexuality. The Parisian home where Jeanne’s mother dusts her late husband’s Algerian artifacts (he seems to have been studious as well as brave, judging from all the books), like their country estate, is typically bourgeois—from the antiquated furnishings to the self-alienated racist servant proud of the dog that attacked beggars. Neither could be more remote from the expatriate Paul’s hotel. But heterosexual relations seem to transcend differences of class and culture: Jeanne’s father kept a photograph of an Algerian mistress, and the speeches of Jeanne’s fiancé and lover are interchangeable, as are her responses to them. Jeanne’s tirade against Tom—“You take advantage of me, you make me do things I’ve never done. . . . You make me do whatever you want. . . . I’m tired of having my mind raped”—obviously could be directed at Paul. Tom’s reaction, pounding her with his fists, proves that, however repressed and childlike, he has what it takes to be a man.

  This is a challenging role to fill on Jeanne’s behalf because she worships the military masculinity of her dashing green-eyed father, the French colonel killed in Algeria in 1958. She repeats the year in telling Paul about it, to counter his ridicule (“all uniforms are bullshit”) and to underline its importance. The patriarch’s 1958 death aligns him with nationalism in crisis. Initiated by French rebel generals in a 1958 coup against France’s colonial government in Algeria, the crisis resulted in a successful challenge of Fourth Republican rule at home. French army rebels in Algeria surrendered when Charles de Gaulle was installed as president of a new centralized government, presiding over the bloodiest years of the French-Algerian conflict and its end in Algeria’s 1962 independence.

  Jeanne’s father, the colonial officer, haunts Last Tango in Paris and can be considered responsible for its plot. His appetite for Algerian mistresses suggests a source for his daughter’s sex drive, just as his early death makes her susceptible to the sexual attentions of an older man or father figure. He has taught Jeanne how to shoot his pistol, and she mimics the lessons, dressed in his heavily medaled uniform and cap. At the end, the father provides both the motive and the means for Paul’s death, through the same officer’s cap and pistol. The motive is Paul’s mockery of military convention when he dons the cap askew, salutes, and asks Jeanne whether she prefers her “hero over-easy or
sunny-side up?” It seems inevitable that Jeanne will respond with the restoration of bourgeois decorum he has challenged throughout their affair, by inflicting a mortal wound with the paternal weapon. Exposed as the caretaker of a seedy hotel inherited after his wife’s suicide, and not the “golden shining . . . warrior” his commanding sexuality has led Jeanne to expect, Paul must be dispensed with violently if he will not leave voluntarily. The woman’s answer to the man’s question, “What the hell difference does it make if I have a flophouse or a hotel or a castle?” is all the difference in the world.

  Jeanne’s murder of Paul represents the father’s posthumous defense of his daughter’s honor against the man who has taken her repeatedly out of wedlock as well as the daughter’s defense of colonial nationalism against that same man’s desecration of its primary symbols. Murder in the name of the father who has given his life to serve French imperial power in Algeria (and trained the family dog to detect “Arabs by their odor”) seems the only proper resolution of the daughter’s brush with Paul. The significance of Last Tango’s Algerian connection is reinforced by the prominence given in the movie to one of its most important articulators, Albert Camus, the French-Algerian Nobel Prize–winning author of Algerian Chronicles (1958).

  Late in the film, Paul has a drink in Marcel’s room, which is filled with framed photographs: one features Simone Signoret, whose daughter, Catherine Allegret, plays a maid in Last Tango; the largest photo is of Albert Camus with his perpetual cigarette. Camus is a suitable oracle for this colloquy between men: Brando owned Camus’s last novel, The Fall (1957), which he annotated heavily, and it provides an implicit register for Last Tango’s emphatically masculine despair. The existential hero of Camus’s fictional confessions articulates the self-justifications and regrets of the aging ladies’ man. Like Paul, Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a rolling stone with little to show save for the camel-hair coat on his back. Clamence has had his own brush with suicide, a female stranger he’s convinced he might have saved from a plunge into the Seine. For both men, women have been a refuge and dominance comes naturally.15 Essentially actors for whom sex provides the ultimate stage (“I often changed parts but it was always the same play . . . verifying each time my special powers”), they both end up playing criminals.16 The human condition in The Fall and Last Tango is a cycle of pain and guilt, broken occasionally by pleasure, through a romantic possibility or insight invariably foiled. This makes Paul’s final role in Last Tango, as a rapist killed in a home invasion, especially fitting.

  Paul in anguish wearing camel-hair coat. © Bettmann/Corbis.

  In his collection of paperwork and stills, Brando kept only one Last Tango review, which discussed the connection between the film and Camus’s novel. Brando’s early aspiration to the ministry and ongoing interest in religion may have piqued his curiosity about Kenneth J. Smith’s Sunday Morning Address: The Last Tango to Nowhere, printed by the Philadelphia Ethical Society. Identifying Paul as “the existential anti-hero par excellence—the loser type, experiencing life in its many facets and finding them all bad,” he speculates: “perhaps this is what Albert Camus had in mind . . . in his novel, The Fall: ‘A single sentence will suffice for modern man; he fornicated and read the papers.’” The parallel extends to Last Tango’s brutally honest appraisal of the secular condition, which, Smith concludes admiringly, is neither pretty nor uplifting, as one might expect from “a serious effort to get down to the very core of human existence.”17

  Camus and Brando provide stylized versions of the exploitative Bohemian male in middle age. Like any fiction, they may resemble but are not to be confused with their creators. Brando invests Paul with traces of his movie history, embellished by personal history related over the years in interviews. It is a canned past served up repeatedly to audiences craving access to the private life of a celebrity. Attaining fame on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire as a youth of twenty-three, Brando soon became adept at manufacturing pasts for the media. Featured in over a hundred articles by the age of thirty, he was jaded before arriving in Hollywood.18

  Paul in dance hall. © Eva Sereny/Redux Pictures.

  Indeed, the most intimate aspect of Brando’s characterization in Last Tango may be Paul’s penchant for fabricating personal history. This is echoed in details pieced together by others, such as the police investigating his wife’s suicide and Jeanne at the picture’s end, rapidly concocting an official explanation of who Paul is while his dead body lies in the background. What do we learn about Paul’s past over the course of Last Tango? He has been an actor, journalist, bongo player, boxer, and kept husband. He studied “whale fucking” at “the University of Congo,” lived in Tahiti and Cuba, is sterile, and married a woman who ran a hotel, which he inherited after she committed suicide. He loves nature, as his mother taught him to, and was traumatized by his parents’ alcoholism and his father’s harshness. The acting, bongo-playing, Tahitian residence, and references to his parents are facts from Brando’s past. The rest are attributes of dramatis personae from his movies or pure inventions. The facts were generally available in features on Brando published in Life, Time, and Newsweek in the 1950s and ’60s; in the 1957 interview he gave Truman Capote in The New Yorker; and on talk shows he did during this period. Brando was too good an actor and too careful an individual to divulge on camera what he hadn’t divulged often before. Moreover, as chapter 8 will speak about in detail, he never did interviews without a motive, whether it was promoting a cause or defending his reputation. It was rare for him to feel violated by an interview, as he did after Truman Capote’s, for he was alert to getting the best of a manipulative proceeding he believed was designed to sell advertising.19

  The most obvious evidence that we are not watching Brando himself on screen in Last Tango is that so much of the performance, especially as the film winds down to its tragic close, is about acting. Brando always insisted that everyone was an actor, that life is acting and that no human can survive without utilizing its basic skills. “Lying for a Living,” the project he launched in his seventies, was designed to codify the vast range of acting techniques people drew on in public and in private. In his typically democratic way, Brando collected participants from the most humble and ordinary to the highest-paid actors in the world. He wrote the skits, directing and critiquing the performances, which were all recorded.20

  The characterization of Paul is another variation on the Brando claim that humans spend most of their time, at least socially, acting. Partly because he is determined to disclose nothing to Jeanne, Paul performs and mimes more than usual. While shaving, for instance, he assumes the persona of a French maître d’ with a thick accent; he smiles seductively, twitching his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, before sodomizing her; he shakes water off his wet clothes with a tap dance à la Fred Astaire; he is an avuncular Brit plying her with drinks (“just a sip for Daddy”); a soused romantic (“If music be the food of love, play on”); and a Jimmy Cagney gangster (“Oh you dirty rat!”) in the dance hall. His final impersonation, saluting as her father in his French officer’s hat, earns the worst review imaginable: a bullet in the gut at close range.

  There is much to appreciate in Brando’s subtle performance, which was nominated for an Academy Award a year after he won and notoriously turned down the award for The Godfather. From the start, when he howls, “Fucking God!” under the subway tracks, to the end, when he attaches the gum from his mouth to the balcony railing before his final breath, Paul is a man who can’t understand his fate and responds with outrage. Deeply ineffectual, he tries to conceal this with cool aggression. He mocks Marcel’s reading and is more interested in controlling than exploring the world and people around him. He has been a roamer rather than a traveler, moving from boredom, not curiosity. His look of satiety, standing beside Jeanne in front of the apartment taking in the morning air after their first sexual encounter, suggests the predominance of sensuality. However angst-ridden, the fulfillment of physical needs goes a long way toward compensating
him. He uses conventional masculine methods with women—silence and withholding balanced by humor and charm. Though these methods have enabled his initial successes, they haven’t made up for his deficiencies. Brando never lets us forget that Paul is a cuckold doomed to being mystified by women. While shaving, for example, he seems genuinely put off by Jeanne’s playful guess that he is a barber, just as he is disturbed by her account of the man she loves while she is bathing. Even more disturbed when he finds she is talking about him, he bites his fingernail and averts his eyes. Brando’s acting is masterful, as he substantiates these reactions with a look or a shift of the jaw.

  With men, Paul is competitive and equally ineffectual, clumsily assaulting the customer who abandons the whore and refuses to pay, hostile to Marcel, who has hurt his pride. Paul is the kind of depressive who is bad for others because he channels his disappointments outward. Brando creates a persona here that for him is fairly unique. Paul is without redeeming qualities, lacking even negative force (the violent energy of Stanley Kowalski or the pathology of Peter Quint). But Brando makes him so empathetic and charming that we are sorry he is gone at the end. This is not because he is a reflection of Brando but because he is a reflection of us.