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Francis Bacon figures go in, Eric Fischl bedrooms come out. Wounded lion and frizzy doll in Passy, an abrupt arrangement, "turbulent zones." He's the American stud gone to seed, former boxer, actor, revolutionary, Marlon Brando by any other name, determined to fuck away the pain in the wake of his wife's suicide. She's a bourgeois bride, Maria Schneider in a documentary snapshot of humid nervousness. The grubby flat is their void for anonymous trysts, a mattress on a dirty floor, "everything outside this place is bullshit." Bernardo Bertolucci's scandale chic, jabbing and exploratory, beastly and rhapsodic. The expatriate is a sort of dark satyr enacting his anarchy on the nymph's orifices, his opposite number is her fiancé (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a Nouvelle Vague pipsqueak breathlessly putting together a cinéma-vérité shrine for her. (His double is Massimo Girotti as his wife's old lover, graying Lotharios in matching bathrobes.) "It's beautiful, without knowing anything." Truth games, sterility versus viscera. Sartre's putain respectueuse, her abode, not quite flophouse and not quite bordello, "I came a long time ago to spend one night and stayed for five years." Rural memories, accents and jokes and confessions, all part of Brando's stunning emotional outpouring. "Le mariage pop," it skips into the rain and comes home to a dead rodent. "If you look real close, you'll see me hiding behind my zipper." A persistent anality, scatological rants, buggery. Rape of the body from one man and rape of the mind from the other, a lass caught between prick and camera. Blood stains that won't wash off, Rimbaud's "Chanson de la plus haute tour," raid on choreography at the palatial tango hall. "We'll change chance to fate." Eros and Thanatos finish where they started, strangers more than ever. Polanski includes a mocking analysis in The Tenant. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. With Maria Michi, Gitt Magrini, Catherine Allégret, Giovanna Galletti and Catherine Breillat.
--- Fernando F. Croce |