For the span of about fifteen minutes
– from the start of the opening credit sequence until Paul and Jeanne make love
against the window and then leave the apartment they will spend a great deal of
the movie in together – this film is cinematic glory at its greatest. The possibilities for the motion picture as a
full blown art form are exploited to spectacular advantage in almost every way
possible before the flick, unfortunately, starts a gradual slide into cliché,
sensationalism, and melodramatic slop, as well as a real slowdown in the sheer
virtuosity of the filmmaking. But what a start!!
The
part of the film I highlight here is bookended by two very distinct modes of
the saxophonist Gato Barbieri. His main
theme is a mid tempo, moody ballad with all the characteristics of Barbieri’s
Latin-fusion period, including the trademark Latin percussion, shakers, and
rattles, but as Paul and Jeanne exit the apartment and go forth into Paris
there explodes onto the soundtrack some wild Ornette Coleman type free jazz on
the piano (Barbieri was playing with Coleman soulmate Don Cherry around this
time) - the perfect accompaniment for the half macho, half joyful timbre of the
scene.
The
painter Francis Bacon once said “Even in love, the barriers of the skin cannot
be broken down.” The point behind the
master stroke of using two Bacon portraits, a male and a female, to display the
credits against is that it can impart a half aesthetic/half intellectual
message or one that is fully aesthetic only, depending on the sensibilities of
the moviegoer. It also speaks to
Bertolucci’s immersion in culture – remember, this is the early 1970s. I wonder if Bertolucci means for the
male/female in Bacon’s paintings to correspond directly somehow to the two
principal characters, or in merely a more general sense? And seeing the name Jean-Pierre Leaud in the
credits – what more can a cinephile ask for?
Fade
in: we see Paul standing under the elevated train tracks. The camera twists in from behind him, on the
right, as he clutches his head in his hands and screams “Fucking God!” into the
noise of the passing train above. He’s a
striking man in a long, almost orange colored coat; while his face dominates
the screen for a second we see Jeanne, an equally striking looking individual,
in soft focus, walking rapidly behind him, catching up on him. His face wears confused, pathetic, hopeless,
helpless, sad expressions. As she
catches up to him and passes on by, walking quickly, she stops to stare at him
for a brief instant. She is flamboyant
beyond flamboyant – a funky black hat, long white coat, high black boots. (The scene is in some respects owned
by the costume designer Gitt Magrini.) As she passes him Bertolucci makes sure to
include in the shot, on the far left, a very conservative couple in black
overcoats walking side by side – a total contrast and comparison to Brando and
Schneider, a juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular. And when she jumps over the broom of the
street sweeper in her path we have our real first introduction to the spell
cast by of one of the greatest female presences in the history of motion
pictures.
She
rushes forward, hurrying on, jumps over the broom, and Bertolucci cuts to the
street below where we see policemen – alert, accessible, and available, an
ironic situation because it is the complete reverse of the circumstances at the end of the film where there is not a
cop to be found anywhere when Jeanne so desperately requires one. There follow more close-ups of Paul’s
perplexed face and both man and woman gaze upward at the apartment – she from
right outside the building where it is located, he still underneath the train
tracks.
We’re
wondering – who are these two? What is
their relationship to each other? The
questions are about to be both answered and prolonged.
We
get our first close up of Schneider as she contemplates the APARTMENT FOR RENT
sign – what a superstar, maybe not Brando’s equal in acting ability but more
than his equal in screen presence and charisma (she will repeat this situation
with Jack Nicholson a few years later).
She hurries down the stairs to a café to phone her mother. Two other people are in the restroom – an old
woman brushing her dentures (the significance of which is…?) and Paul,
brooding. The only way he could have
gotten there before her is to have gone straight down while she went up to the
lobby of the building to read the APARTMENT FOR RENT sign. In another moment he will be in a place just
a shade before her once again – we can’t know it at the time, but while the
camera stays on her in the phone booth, calling her mother, he gets the key to
the apartment from the concierge and enters it.
This
phone call gives us our first little bit of exposition – Jeanne tells her
mother that she is going to look at an apartment and then to the station to
meet Tom, presumably her boyfriend or husband.
But the visual exposition is just as strong – she opens her coat, puts
her hand on her hip, the camera lingers on her legs as she preens for it. Bertolucci’s message is clear, and it’s not a
feminist one – this is a woman primed to be fucked.
The
concierge in the building pleads ignorance of the apartment for rent when
Jeanne says, with great flourish, “I’m here for the apartment.” The concierge says she knows nothing of the
sign and complains that people come and go and she’s always the last to
know. She tells Jeanne to go look at the
apartment herself if she so desires because she, the concierge, is (presciently)
afraid of the rats. She can’t find the
key; Jeanne disgustedly turns to go; the concierge produces a duplicate with a cackle,
making an insulting remark about Jeanne’s youth. The concierge bursts into song, and a hand
reaches out to place an empty bottle outside the door of an apartment. The principal musical theme - a little too
schmaltzy here - plays on the soundtrack.
Bertolucci throws in a neat little auteur move on the clank of the
bottle, switching the focus from the concierge in the background to Jeanne in
the foreground. But the whole scene is
an exercise in cinema – the camera starts back, off to the right, and slowly
moves in on the window until the window is center shot. This is reminiscent of the very first shot of
the film that picked Brando up under the Metro tracks.
Jeanne ascends to
the apartment in the elevator in a shot that’s lit in black and gray, in great
contrast to the stark lambancy that the scenes have been framed in thus
far.
Once within the
dark apartment she opens shades and the balcony doors and gets a fright to see
Paul sitting by the fireplace. She
remarks that he must have come in behind her when she entered and left the door
opened, but he says no, he was already there.
Almost instantly they’re talking about where the furniture should
go. He moves around; in a too obvious
symbol, or metaphor, or whatever you want to call it, her reflection is shown
in a cracked mirror. This time the
panning camera moves back, not in closer, as she asks him, in English “What are
you doing?” She – and we – are totally
unable to make sense of this man’s dark, strange behavior. Neither she nor we, the audience, know a
thing about him as yet.
In a shot
photographed in a blue and white that clashes with everything else we’ve seen
so far (as did the black and gray of the elevator shot), she goes to the bathroom
and pees casually. She returns; the
camera backs up to show her black hat isolated on the floor; after she asks, “You
still here?” he sweeps her up into his arms.
As sex scenes
often are in the movies, this once is a turn on, a turn off, and
bewildering. The brute animal force of
it is electrifying, but there are too many questions – for example, they’ve
passed each other twice already, once in the street under the train tracks and
then again in the lavatory in the café.
They’re both unforgettable looking individuals – they don’t recognize
each other in the apartment? Perhaps
they do but choose not to comment. This
would go a little way towards explaining the spontaneous combustion.
I can imagine what
feminist critics might have to say about all this -especially the way her body
jerks like a marionette after she rolls off him once they fall to the floor,
and the clear shot of her pubic hair that accompanies this, to say nothing of
Paul’s over the top priapic antics. It’s
not my purpose to defend or criticize this here.
Oddly, though Paul
never takes his coat off during any of the meeting, as they leave the building
we see him, through the glass of the front door, putting it on. What?!
When did he take it off? He wears an impish, almost mischievous, grin as
they come out – not peccant in any way - while Jeanne seems shocked, dazed,
confused. He takes the sign APARTMENT
FOR RENT down, crumples it up, throws it away – the lease is signed, the
relationship has begun.
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