FEW FILMS BEFORE OR SINCE HAVE BEEN AS NOTORIOUS OR CONTROVERSIAL AS BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI’S EROTIC CLASSIC IN WHICH THE DIRECTOR, HOT FROM THE ACCLAIM SURROUNDING THE CONFORMIST, WOOED BRANDO TO DROP HIS MASKS.
Its subject is the anguish of an expatriate American recovering from his wife’s unexplained suicide and finding solace in an anonymous sexual tryst with a young French bourgeois in an abandoned apartment. What still amazes today is not just the brutal language and sexual daringincluding the famous butter scenebut the film’s intense intimacy, the burnished photography of Vittorio Storaro (an orange cast evokes both gold and shit), and the wailing score of Gato Barbieri. And the other key actorsan effervescently youthful Maria Schneider, a touchingly naive Jean-Pierre Leaudgive brilliant support to the most revealing and magnetic of all Brando’s screen performances. David Thompson.