Last Tango in Paris (1972) on Netflix
Jeanne, a young Parisian engaged to a filmmaker, visits a vacant apartment and finds Paul, a middle-aged American widower. He sets one rule for their affair: no names.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.8/1063,238 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jeanne, a twenty-year-old Parisian, is engaged to Tom, a filmmaker who follows her with a camera for a documentary about her life and her father, a war hero. She goes alone to look at a vacant apartment on the Left Bank and finds Paul, a middle-aged American hotel owner, already there. They have sex in the empty rooms without exchanging names, then go their separate ways. Paul, whose wife Rosa has just taken her own life, returns the next day; the two agree to meet there twice a week for sex only, never speaking of their names, their pasts or the world outside. Paul takes the lease and signs it under a false name.
Cast
- Luce Marquandas Olympia
- Dan Diamentas TV Sound Engineer / L'ingénieur du son
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In the film's anal rape scene, only Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci knew beforehand that butter would be used as a lubricant. Maria Schneider said the scene had a tremendously negative effect on her.
- Bernardo Bertolucci first planned to cast Dominique Sanda, who had developed the idea with him, and Jean-Louis Trintignant. Trintignant refused, and when Marlon Brando accepted, Sanda was pregnant and decided not to do the film.
- A week after its Italian release, police seized all copies of the film, and in 1976 the Supreme Court ordered every copy destroyed. Bertolucci received a four-month suspended prison sentence and lost his civil rights, including voting rights, for five years.
- Marlon Brando refused to speak to director Bernardo Bertolucci for 15 years after production was completed. Maria Schneider said Brando told her he felt "raped and manipulated" by the film.
- Marlon Brando refused to memorize his lines and instead had them written on cue cards posted around the set, forcing Bertolucci to keep them out of frame. His famous upward glance over his wife's body is him looking for the next card.
- When officials in Montclair, New Jersey failed to ban the film, theatergoers had to push through a mob of 200 outraged residents who shouted "perverts" and "homos" at them, and a bomb threat temporarily halted the showing.
- A Canadian ban on the film by the Nova Scotia Board of Censors led to the landmark 1978 Supreme Court of Canada split decision in Nova Scotia (Board of Censors) v McNeil, which upheld the provinces' right to censor films.
- In December 2024, a planned screening of Last Tango in Paris at the Parisian theater Cinémathèque française was cancelled after women's rights groups protested the showing over the film's rape scene.
