These are the qualities that run through many Brando films, from A Streetcar Named Desire on: until he turns into a patriarch himself in The Godfather and a rambling sage in Apocalypse Now. And these are the qualities Bertolucci picks up in Last Tango in Paris and rests the whole movie on. He certainly can’t rest it on the sulky Maria Schneider, who makes a great belated image of the 1960s but can’t really do anything but pout and undress. ‘Vous êtes américain?’ she asks when they meet, but we already know the answer. He is not only American, and not only Paul, the bereaved character in the film seeking to find a renewal of life in Schneider’s youth and weirdly submissive attraction to him. He is Marlon Brando, a man who has made a career out of not saying what he wants, perhaps even not knowing what he wants, and getting it all the same. Bertolucci, like the great cineaste he is, made a hymn to old movies, and to an old movie star, before they were even that old.