I had heard of this movie, so I watched it on Netflix last night. After finishing it, I am wondering if there is some deeper meaning that I missed.
First, Marlon Brando’s character meets a young girl in an apartment that he is looking at. After talking for 3 minutes, he proceeds to have crazy monkey sex with her. This is not unusual as it happens to me twice daily. :rolleyes: But putting that aside as poetic license, they have an anonymous sexual relationship.
I couldn’t identify with what the girl got out of it. Brando was a detached, self-absorbed asshole through the whole movie, using her as a sex toy and sharing nothing of himself. She kept pushing for more of a relationship and he responds with nothing except anal rape with butter.
Then when he finally grows a soul and offers her something, she kills him.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t alive in 1972 and maybe I missed a deeper meaning to the film. What was that deeper meaning? I don’t see it and am left with the opinion that it was a terrible, terrible movie that simply got famous because of the raunchy sex scenes. Anyone disagree?
I am sure the cinema buffs see all kinds of meaning, or at least pretend they do. But yeah, at the time it was unusual in its explicitness in a film that had a major star, for its dealing with people who deal with sex anonymously and without love and that having negative consequences, for its lack of any character that the viewership could like much or identify with. People watched it, often thinking they’d get some tittlilation, and were confused and disturbed instead, and figured that they better act like they understood something or else look dumb. It was Brando, the method actor, it had to have meaning. Didn’t it?
It did break ground. I don’t think that you’d have seen *Looking for Mr. Goodbar *a few years later unless Tango had come first.
Mike Royko, a famous Chicago columnist, reviewed this movie when it came out. The title of the column is Brando’s Role: A Boring Slob. So you can guess his opinion of the movie.
Quote: “That’s about it. It is a two-hour movie about a self-pitying, self-centered, whining, foul-mouth, boring slob.”
Mike uses the movie’s story about Marlon’s cow crap covered shoes to prove his point.
Yeah, I’d heard the Rodger Ebert (IIRC, it may have been someone else) doesn’t consider the movie pornographic – you end up so disgusted at the characters, you’re no longer aroused. I did watch it a long time ago, and I thought I got it – the girl is just the same as Brando’s character, she didn’t really want her need for a relationship to be fulfilled, she just wanted to want it. Or maybe be seen to be wanting it. Anyway, as time passes, I just figure – put this one in the “Director being weird for weirdness’s sake” file. A pretty thick folder as time goes on.
The story basically was about two people who could only connect at a physical level. Their relationship was fine as long as it stayed strictly sexual. Once they attempted to get together as people, it fell apart.
The story arc was that Paul started out as wanting only sex. (A key factor in the movie is that Paul’s wife had just committed suicide. We’re not seeing the normal Paul until the end of the movie.) At the end of the movie he’s gotten past the shock and is ready to start back towards a normal life.
Jeanne, on the other hand, had a surface desire to live a normal life but underneath this she rejected these values. Paul was able to break through the surface and show Jeanne who she really was. But then Paul reverted to what he really was and Jeanne didn’t want that.
Paul’s tragedy was that he was able to show Jeanne the way she wanted to go but he was unable to follow her. Jeanne’s tragedy was her realization at the end that she was alone.
This was probably part of it. I didn’t identify or much care for Paul or Jeanne. I mean, you feel sorry for Paul because he is upset that his wife committed suicide, but he acts like such a prick through the whole movie, he could kill himself too for all I care.
Jeanne is engaged and fucking around on her fiance. That usually fails the sympathy test. Like another poster said, you seem to hate the characters so much that even the sex scenes are not satisfying because you are pissed off that people like that are getting laid.
I’m not sure what the rating was originally. On Netflix it was rated NC-17, but that wasn’t around in the 70s. I guess the equivalent would have been X or maybe they cut some scenes to get it to an R. The anal butter rape would certainly give it an X rating by itself. Maybe if you cut that scene it could be R.
The thing about that flick that bothers me is how some old fat slob gets to bone a chick 30 years younger than him just like that. Dumbass male fantasy bullshit; not art at all.
But no, IIRC it was about an old, fat guy getting it on with a woman who was totally out of his league. There might’ve been a deeper meaning, but…nope, read the book (thankfully a short one)…and that sums it up.
I don’t see that. Brando was not an old fat slob in real life at that point so it would have to have been part of his character. Where did you get that in the movie? If anything, the fact that Brando convinced a younger woman to go to bed with him like he did would indicate that his character was supposed to be seen as attractive to women.
It might be noted that in real life Brando had three children with a woman about 35 years his junior in the late '80s/'90s when he was a considerably larger man.
She didn’t want to have a deeper relationship with him, she wanted to want a deeper relationship. When he took that want away, she shot him. The movie is French, you see.
