SOURCE: Kline, T. Jefferson. “‘A Turbid, Unreal Past, in Certain Measure True’: Last Tango in Paris.” In Bertolucci's Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema, pp. 106–26. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Kline examines the role of the Orpheus myth in Last Tango in Paris.

I hear the echo of those tangos I watched danced on the pavement On an instant that today stands out alone Without before or after, against oblivion And had the taste of everything lost, Everything lost and recovered. 

Jorge Luis Borges

“Tonight we improvise!” shouts a gleeful Jeanne (Maria Schneider) as she enters the apartment in the rue Jules Verne for the third time. Despite the allusions to Pirandello and Verne, the film [Last Tango in Paris] represented a watershed for [Bernardo] Bertolucci, for he was no longer tied to a literary model. His direct engagement with literature seemed to...