Lead Poisoning

This will serve as the official notice of the fact that I am being poisoned by some fiend who is using some kind of heavy metal, most likely lead or Led Zeppelin. So if this thing seems more unreal and disjointed than usual, that will explain it. The real title of this should be Love, but I suppose that those of you who are comfortable working with universal symbols should have no trouble understanding that when I write a journal entry about lead poisoning, I am in fact writing one about Love.

I guess what got me started thinking about the subject, apart from the slow pulse, lethargy and constipation, was the fact that I watched Last Tango In Paris last night. I think that some denizens of the modern world will not enjoy this movie, except for one critical infamous part, but I really enjoyed it, and I think that it shows many of the things that hate about modern movies. First of all, there was no expression of comical irony in the form of " phh yeah! yah think? duh??" or whatever snappy means one can attempt to demonstrate superiority over another. Right there it earns a ticket to the movie hall of fame. Their performances were understated which was nice, giving you the feeling that you were actually watching two (or more) persons interacting. This was one of the points of the movie. The two central characters were only in love when they were not dealing with the outside world. They were actually being themselves without the phony trappings, and while there were hints that this would only be a world of nothing but lust (such as the creation of the primitive names), they really grew to know each other, without knowing the details of their previous lives.

Their love becomes cheap and cliched and debauched only when they are no longer living in the womb of the apartment. It strongly resembles the sappy version of love that was supposedly being filmed as reality by Jeanne's boyfriend. She wants neither the phony marriage nor the phony version of Paul, and puts and end to him and his suffering. The world of the "adult" triumphs.

The Paul character, while accepting heavy contributions from the actual life of Marlon Brando, is very well done. The two best scenes he has are when he confronts the corpse of his ex wife who has committed suicide, and , believe it or not, when he has his beloved do a proctological exam on him. I think this was lifted from Romeo and Juliet.

With his ex wife, we first see him sitting in a room of what looks like only flowers. Of course they are all cut flowers and the the camera pans to show us the perfect body of his ex wife, Rosa. When Paul say " Why did you lie to me?, that was the worst thing that you did to me!" this may have been one of Brando's best moments on the screen. I think if you are not moved by this you are either at least a little dead, or you have never been lied to. At least you THINK you have never been lied to.

The prostate check is a great scene not because it is at all titillating (at least I HOPE no one thought so) but because it is a great spontaneous expression of what true love is. It really means that you are willing to suffer whatever you must to be together, that you MUST be together I think this idea would be ridiculed by today's audiences who figure if they can't get it at Hertz, it must be at Avis. We are all interchangeable, and you see it through the homogenization of society. Advertising and they way we are all processed in everyday life reinforce this concept. For a brief time, these two people are really in love, even if the difficult to define length of that love is only this one scene.

I have read that some people ( I am sure they are terminally infected by today's world) find the exposition in this movie to be difficult and so they find the pace boring. They need to relax and realize that Marlon Brando is not going to get caught on a runway Metro train, and PAY ATTENTION. The cinematography here is very effective at setting location (Paris??) and mood, and if the viewer really follows the movie everything is revealed. It is linear too, just not broadcast to a brain dead Hollywood audience. It is interrupted as well because of the need for Jeanne and Paul to not talk about their lives. An example of the natural way the story is explained is when Paul meets Marcel for the first time in the movie, there is a reference to the fact that he was Rosa's lover. If you were paying attention when Rosa's copious blood was being mopped up as the cleaning woman recites what she told to the police, you would understand what is going on. The movie is quite clear- it just starts with no back story, and an Eisenstein like moment.

And finally the main reason that I decided to write about this: I thought it's point about love transcending everything else, or needing too was still very powerful. Would any movie today dare to make this point? There are all kinds of love stories, but do any of them show so explicitly that if love is real, NOTHING else matters- the condition of the body, the amount of money, the social status.. of course Last Tango finally folds to the inertia of society- that all these trappings are SUPREMELY important. So when I finished watching this movie, other than feeling like wanting to wander the streets of Paris like Marlon Brando, I gained some calm and some sadness when I realized that I am not loved. No one is with me. My family really loves me out of obligation, and I don't say that as a negative, just an expression of reality.

If she loved me, she would be here with me now.