Deborah Mailman: ‘There’s almost a permission now – people can just be incredibly cruel and racist’

The actor, who reunites with Warwick Thornton in his frontier western Wolfram, reflects on her late parents, the failed voice referendum and her obsession with space Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Deborah Mailman sat in rusty red sand on Arrernte country in central Australia, and she felt her character’s deep grief. She was filming a scene in Warwick Thornton ’s 1930s frontier western Wolfram , playing Pansy, an Indigenous woman whose children have been stolen from her. As her bundled baby cries, Pansy silently cuts her hair off with a knife – “a grieving ritual”, Mailman says – even though her missing children might still be alive. Mailman is the mother of two boys herself, Henry, 19, and Oliver, 16. Portraying Pansy’s anguish, she says, “requires no acting”. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/B5wOSgI via IFTTT

Last Tango in Paris at 50: Bertolucci’s controversial drama remains troubling

The Italian director’s knotty drama remains a provocation, a film filled with lyrical beauty but also repulsive cruelty

Revisiting films on the occasion of major anniversaries can be a disorienting reminder of time’s too-swift passage: that film is now 20/30/40 years old? How can that be? Why does it still feel so much younger than I do? In other cases, however, the film wears its advanced age in a way that makes complete sense, and so it is with Last Tango in Paris, released in cinemas in 1973. Now a half-century old, Bernardo Bertolucci’s lightning rod for scandal and debate has dated in many of the ways you might expect, but that’s not quite what I mean: at 50, the film’s age has now caught up with the overriding air of middle-aged despair and disarray that it always carried. In a sense, it was a film made to be forgotten, and then remembered with bittersweet, conflicted feelings, its significant beauty curdled over time.

Bring up Last Tango in Paris in cinephile circles today – especially those reckoning with the gender politics of the artform post-MeToo – and you won’t hear that many fond endorsements. When it’s brought up at all, the conversation swiftly narrows to its most notorious scene: the one where Marlon Brando’s Paul, a recently widowed American abroad, holed up in a desolately furnished Parisian apartment, forces himself on Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, a 20-year-old ingenue whose name he refuses to learn. Grabbing a dab of fridge-cold butter for lubrication, he anally rapes her.

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