What does it take to truly know another human being?
Are human beings even knowable at all?
Do we get to a point where everything we think we know is thrown out the window and we start all over again at square one?
This film has been read a variety of ways, some highlighting the sex, some highlighting the emotion, some highlighting the performances, some highlight death. Depending on what a critic wants to talk about, they will highlight that portion at the expense of the rest and end up misreading the film. Maybe we're all misreading it. Even Bertolucci, who calls the film a romance, which to me is ludicrous.
The sex of the film is circumstantial, a by product -- though an essential by-product. Brando's character wants to strip a portion of his life down to a primeval essence, doing away with names and history in favor of raw sexuality and unblocked emotion. Eventually, the past of the characters cannot but infringe on the purity of silence because the past both justifies and contradicts every reason they have for being in that room. If sex is anything it is the brief physical union of two human beings and because of that, it can't simply be isolated like a math problem on the blackboard. It always comes with people attached, people with names and places and histories and fears and desires beyond the physical.
Brando's Paul says he doesn't want to be named except by a grunt or a groan, but human beings don't speak in grunts and groans. Maybe that's what he hates about life. He wishes he could get to some imagined reality where language doesn't matter anymore. But he can't stop talking.
Is it true, what he says? Is it fantasy? Does it matter?
She is about to be married and is making a film with her fiance about their life together and her personal history. She is bored by it. Her fiance's camera is an ineffective way to understand her. She volunteers stories and thoughts to Paul who dismisses them. He isn't interested in history, he doesn't care where she's been. In the midst of these close relationships she is alone. Why does she feel the need to talk about those things? She can't help it. She just does.
She subverts easy explanations. The truly liberated woman, freed from the responsibility of justifying herself. But no one is truly free; no free person can go very far before constructing barriers again.
So we return to the first question: are human beings knowable?
I don't think so. That's the tragedy of this world.
The opening shot of the film is a Francis Bacon painting taking up half the frame. A man sits reclined on a couch. He seems hollow. Maybe he's being analyzed. Maybe he's just reclining. Either way, his face seems broken and demonic, his exposed thighs bulge into each other without clear definition. Paint splatters across the front of him, not in the painting but on the painting.
The brutal psychology.
I can't justify everything that happens in the film or everything said, but I can't look away either. Bertolucci has crafted a fascinating film regardless of perceived faults that prove themselves to be strengths if viewed in the right framework.
That, to me, is the strength of great art.
film journal entry: 04.17.2013
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