Capital Celluloid - Day 128: Monday May 9

The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975) & Last Tango In Paris (Bertolucci, 1972):
Prince Charles Cinema, 6.10pm 

Two films from Italian masters on foreign shores. If you have the patience The Passenger is a revelation, the celebrated circular shot towards the end one of the most audacious in movie history.

Here is the trailer.

Last Tango In Paris is worth seeing for Marlon Brando's performance alone, as naked and honest a performance as you're likely to ever see up on the screen.

Take a look at these credits (with images of the work of artist Francis Bacon)  

Here are the Chicago Reader movie reviews:

The Passenger

A masterpiece, one of Michelangelo Antonioni's finest works (1975). Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider star as a journalist who trades one identity for another and the woman who becomes his accomplice (and ultimately the moral center of his adopted world). Less a thriller (though the mood of mystery is pervasive) than a meditation on the problems of knowledge, action for its own sake, and the relationship of the artist to the work he brings into being. Next to this film, Blowup seems a facile, though necessary, preliminary. By all means go. 126 min.



The operatic extravagance of Bernardo Bertolucci's style has emerged more clearly since this 1972 drama, which still managed to seem vaguely naturalistic in the midst of its extravagant camera moves and eccentric construction. The surface plausibility is probably the contribution of Marlon Brando, whose performance has strength and detail enough to counterbalance Bertolucci's taste for pure psychological essence. With Maria Schneider as Brando's lover and Jean-Pierre Leaud in the Ralph Bellamy part (he has a job). Photography by Vittorio Storaro. In English and subtitled French. 127 min.

No comments: