Aseem Chhabra salutes the Italian Master and his cinema
IMAGE: Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.
It was the summer of 1974.
I had just finished high school and my father sent me on a month-long vacation to London.
The city was a daily film festival for me.
In one month, I saw a range of American films that had not played in India and would perhaps have been banned or heavily censored given the political mood of the country -- The Godfather, Siddhartha, The Sting, The Exorcist, The Way We Were...
I saw an Italian-French co-production, Last Tango In Paris, originally an X-rated film, that shocked my innocent mind.
Over the years, it has had a deep emotional impact on me.
I first heard about Last Tango at a time when I did not know anything about its director Bernardo Bertolucci.
I remember a show on Doordarshan, where the film critic Amita Malik mentioned she had seen the film at a festival abroad.
I remember her saying she had heard the film's lead actors -- Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider -- engaged in real sex during the filming of a crucial scene.
Of course, I had to see the film.
And I watched it in a small art-house theatre in London.
For years as a teenager and then an adult, I heard friends and others talk about the butter scene (Brando uses butter to perform anal sex with Schneider) and it remained a joke.
But repeated viewings of the film led me to realise that Last Tango was not a pornographic film.
Instead, it is a very sad film, a devastating story about a broken man, coping with his wife's suicide and driven into a few hellish days of anonymous sex.
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