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96).
Conclusion
Although the director chose a denouement for Last Tango in Pans - Paul proposing marriage
to Jeanne, her refusal, his intimidating stalking of her and Jeanne's violent reaction - which
privileged the element of spectacle in line with classical Hollywood narratives and generated
a dramatic effect, overall it is an ending that generates a sense of anticlimax as it weakens the
film's socio-political perspective. While the ending may reinforce the film's emotional
structure which is founded on anguish and distress, the representation of Paul's escalating
selfish dominance makes the character incongruent with the discourses of personal and social
freedom that have been aired until the film's final sequences, and this creates an unsatisfying
narrative outcome. An open ending would have given the film a clearer position in the
context of contemporary debates regarding the social constraints affecting relationships. In
these terms, Tango typifies a pattern in Bertolucci's films that would cause controversy and
partly invalidate the intellectual resonances in his work. It centres on his occasional tendency
to lose the balance between intellectual rigour and cinematic spectacle, a balance that he
sometimes achieved through articulating pertinent socio-political issues through sophisticated
mises-en-scene and film narration. Nonetheless, as will be reiterated in the conclusion to this
study, Last Tango in Paris remains one of his most influential films.
Notes
1. Casetti. F., (1978) Bertolucci, Florence: La Nuova Italia, p. 83; Loshitzky Y., (1995) The Radical
Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 72-73.
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