Sex in the Head

Last Tango in Paris is an expressionist film in the line of Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paddy Chayefsky. To admit this at the outset is to minimize any risk of understanding the phenomenon too quickly. Expressionism, after all, seeks to distort. What is lost in fidelity to fact is gained in the imaginative truth of the form: or so we are asked to believe. Lang and Godard belong to the small group of commanding figures in the history of cinema precisely because they knew the char...