Tangle in Paris

How, I ask, can your correspondent claim to have reviewed Bertolucci's Let's Tangle in Paris when he ommitted all reference to that powerful central scene, so arresting in its primitive aggression, which strains from every pore to the single leaping flame, — a veritable flagstaff - that climbs unstoppably, hopefully, towards the ceiling, so that she trembles as the colours approach, wondering if she should stand, or kneel, out of respect. His hands rasp over her, burning her spine, shoulders, biceps, nipples, navels, thighs, shins, never tarrying, eager for new ground, new lands to prospect and milk of their precious secretions, until her body bums, melts like buttered toast and she reaches out resolutely with both hands for — it is some distance away — the central heating switch. 'Get your head down that end,' he says, ' and dangle your legs over the clothesline.' So saying, he crawls under the bed, balances on his neck backwards, and does it over her left shoulder.

I must say that on first viewing the extraordinary, highly significant scene, I thought that it represented the crowning, well-nigh miraculous achievement of an artiste long up-and-coming, now truly engage vers the unique possibilities that are his, available to his penetrating - and the word seems scarcely adequate — intellect, which is so typical of the thrusting restlessness of the modern age, — its eternal quest for new vistas of experience, — while pursuing the ultimate relentlessly, revoltingly.

'Do you think ultimate sex is really possible?' is Jeanne's critical question, as she lies smoking at the end of the scene.

It is scarcely one of the questions modern cinema would not do well to avoid.