Every film fan over the age of 40 will recall the conspicuous kerfuffle that surrounded the release of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Parisin 1972.
For a week or so, BBC news bulletins had fun accosting pink-faced colonels as they tried to sneak surreptitiously into cinemas showing this famously shocking film.
The picture, in which Marlon Brando does something famously unhygienic with butter and the lower half of Maria Schneider, was, of course, the victim of cuts and bans in the Republic. Now, finally, it arrives in a shiny new print at the Irish Film Institute.
Thirty-five years on, Last Tangocomes across as a great unhealthy burp, brewed by the feast of excess that was the 1960s. Unlike earlier Bertolucci pictures, such as The Conformistand The Spider's Stratagem, the richness of the photography finds no correlative in the dialogue. Brando, his face already tending towards terminal collapse, wanders about Paris spouting misogynistic gibberish while metaphors of childish banality crowd about him. Can that train racing into a tunnel really mean what we think it means? Sadly, yes.
Still, Last Tangoremains a historical artefact that every thinking cineaste should see at least once. They don't make them like this any more. Thank goodness.
