Starring: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial, landmark X-rated film initiated a trend for arthouse films to include explicit erotic content. It told about a primal sexual affair between middle-aged, bitter and grieving hotel owner Paul (Brando in his seventh and last Best Actor-nominated role) whose wife had committed suicide and a 20-year old French student Jeanne (Schneider) who was engaged to be married to Tom (Léaud), a film director who was making a cinema verite film about her.
Upon meeting in an apartment both are looking to rent, Paul forces himself violently on Jeanne sexually, bordering on rape, and begins a torrid, sexually perverse but anonymous 'no questions asked' affair with her (they don't know each other's names) that becomes increasingly vile, unromantic and scatological. His set of rules was notable for the time: "We are going to forget everything we knew - everything". The pure sexual nature of their relationship included the bathtub washing scene and the infamous, disturbing, and explicit sodomy (butter-lubricated anal sex) scene on the floor ("Get the butter").
Later, Paul reciprocated by letting Jeanne penetrate him anally with her fingers - part of his objective to "look death right in the face...go right up into the ass of death... till you find the womb of fear." Predictably, the film ended with his violent death on the balcony when she shot him with her father's gun. The film remains the sole still-mature rated (X, NC-17) film to earn Oscar nominations, alongside Ellen Burstyn's Oscar nomination for Requiem for a Dream (2000). (Midnight Cowboy (1969) and The Exorcist (1973) were subsequently re-rated as R.)
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