Defense of Bertolucci: #MeToo and “Last Tango in Paris”

In Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Paul (Marlon Brando) is rebelling against patriarchy, while Jeanne (Maria Schneider) wants to defend it (with colonialism and militarism to boot) at all costs.  She pays for his rage, in ways feminists now exaggerate (and now we see from Jessica Palud’s Being Maria that the actress in real life was a victim of the industry and media, not so much the filmmaker or actor, two very different forms of violation), he, fatally, of her timidity.  He represents a failed rebellion evoking stances of liberation requiring authenticity, she a false feminism that was horrible, offering women only conformist empowerments and men a constant pillorying for imaginary crimes.  A police state that enforces morals and a liberationism that is a pose. Carceral feminism was a tool kit for the corporate state at its most oppressive.  Those who fail to understand this fail will also fail, fatally, to understand some of the 'white male rage' that has recently been expressed on the far right.  Bertolucci understood something of it.  (Denis Villeneuve has no clue).  It is a banal (yet vitally important) truth that should comfort our left-liberals that, if the children of Paul and Jeanne whom the film's plot (through her decisive act) makes impossible were to learn from experiences like this and get together, this time perhaps not as young lovers but wizened comrades, they, or we, could bring down both the familialism that oppresses Paul and the world of spectacular commercial exploitation that ruined Maria Schneider’s life.  Liberals could never want that, and probably haven't the desire or imagination to try anyway.  Jeanne and Paul are both figures out of Francis Bacon, or Beckett, and that is darker, more genuinely political, and leftist in a way we may still be learning, our activists, boring as ever though sometimes right on their points, nothwithstanding.  We know a lot about how radical politics can go wrong, which, as in this film, can often tell us a lot, and we still don't know what bodies with a radical politics including a ‘feminist’ one can do.  Social movement organizations will defend (or start by defending, against the fascist attacks) the fact that some of them are working, often practically, on that question; as urgent as is that defense, important indeed is that we are.