exposure of flesh or exploitative sex scenes. It wasn't so much the nudity that was upsetting and offensive but more the exposure of the nudity of the vulnerability of the human condition that met with intolerance.
Director Bernado Bertolucci, a Pisces with Sun opposite Neptune, is known as a cinematographer's director and poet of the visual image for whom exquisitely photographed scenes in movies like The Sheltering Sky and The Last Emperor take precedence over dramatic action and narrative. During the filming of Last Tango in Paris, however, Bertolucci, experiencing transiting Pluto opposite his natal sun, (See chart; solar only) chose to submerge his usual proclivity for the transcendently beautiful for the disclosure of what Roger Ebert called "sudden, brutal, lonely sex."(2)
To carry the film, Bertolucci chose Marlon Brando to play a fortysomething American suffering from the anguish and loneliness of the recent suicide of his wife. Brando, an actor with both the Sun and Moon square Pluto birth (see chart), was the actor of his generation to single-handedly break the mold of stilted and affected acting by bringing an authenticity, rawness, and brooding—all Pluto traits—to both stage and screen. With Last Tango in Paris, Brando brings these traits to heights never since surpassed.
Brando's character is a case study of Pluto's extremes and paradoxes. He is at one turn secretive, manipulative, guarded and not forthcoming while simultaneously irrepressibly authentic, honest, and wildly uninhibited. He despises societal convention yet appreciative of its protective veil. He is bruised, wounded and hurt yet finds the strength to abuse, punish, and control others. And finally, he is compulsively ruled by sexuality-the fear of it, the obsessive need to engage in it, the possession of orgiastic release.
And finally, in a monologue addressing the loneliness of the human condition, Brando suggests the key to ultimately overcoming this condition is not withdrawal, repression, or any other defense but simply a courageous entrance into the condition itself. He states: "You are alone until you stare death right in the face."- the key to loneliness and arguably all Pluto problems.
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