Last Tango in Paris is a dirty, melodramatic soap opera, complete with monstrous characters, quippy lines, and rich swells of overwrought music. Yes, many have called it a classic and yes, it was recently named among the sexiest films of all time by Entertainment Weekly. But it is impossible for me to see the film as a classic when it is so transparently pretentious, and even harder to view it as remotely sexy when the entire point of the film is to watch an aging, flabby Marlon Brando treat a young French woman like a ragdoll whore.

We first see Paul (Brando) walking the streets of Paris aimlessly. He is a depressed shell of a man. Walking ahead of him is Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a young bride-to-be searching for an apartment. When she finds a room to rent, Paul is already there -- he stole the key and is using the room to sit and sulk in the shadows. Mere moments later, however, he swaggers in for the proverbial kill, molesting Jeanne with an insistent vigor that wouldn't seem to befit a greasy, slovenly, depressed old man. Soon Paul rents the apartment and offers Jeanne an ultimatum: "I want to know nothing about you," he says, with all the Method messiness of mid-life Brando. "We're gonna meet in here and forget everything about out there."

That Jeanne allows this behavior to commence with nary a struggle befits the purposely confounding tone director with which Bernardo Bertolucci wants the film to ride all the way to the end. Here are characters who meet by chance and engage in all forms of sexual activity -- many times violent -- and seem alternately to form a psychic bond and open resentment. For the most part, Paul orders Jeanne around, engages in occasional physical abuse, and frequently forcing himself on her sexually. She does not appreciate being treated as a servant, but sometimes loves being manhandled. Confusion extends to the emotional fabric of the characters as well: Paul doesn't want to know names but is okay with revealing his hidden depths in eloquent soliloquies, while Jeanne vacillates between being an emotionally-available sex kitten and a resisting victim.

Both characters have complicated backstories intended to give them greater depth. In Brando's case, we discover that his wife recently committed suicide. To add insult to injury, she also carried on a not-so-secret affair for years. For Schneider, she is engaged to an idealistic young artist (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who wants to depict their love with a guerrilla filmmaking crew filming them in various forms of manufactured embrace, like an early '70s version of soft-scripted reality TV.

The dichotomy between the two male characters is obvious. Leaud's artsy-fartsy boyfriend is so obsessed with the meticulously crafted contrivance of "reality" that he barely exists in the real world. Brando's aging misogynist is completely antithetical to that notion, but equally idealistic -- he is so determined to cut off the outside world that he wants his "last tango" to take place in an ugly, solitary, empty apartment. "Everything outside this room is bullshit," he tells Schneider in a rare moment of tender embrace, and for a moment we glimpse what Bertolucci attempts to do but ultimately cannot -- to show a man desperately trying to mask his pain, to depict a monstrous character with a hidden soul.

But in this film, Bertolucci more resembles the deluded, self-aggrandizing filmmaker played by Leaud -- the director seems so driven to push the envelope and appear sexually "evolved" that crafting fully realized characters becomes a secondary concern. The film doesn't so much tell a story as it does vaguely sketch characters and demand them to go through contradictory physical and emotional actions in an attempt to reach some enlightened human truth. The narrative is not skillfully structured nor even artfully meandering -- the characters do the things they do merely because Bertolucci deems their actions controversial, and their story unfolds the way it does because Bertolucci thinks it will say something significant.

What, though, is significant about Last Tango in Paris other than the frankness of its sexuality and the frequency of its female nudity (since Brando, conveniently, remains covered throughout)? Bertolucci seems to want to say that "movie love" is wholly artificial, that any form of traditional love cannot exist among humans who are really no different than animals. Therefore, the expression of base sexuality and the fulfillment of carnal desires are truer than any romantic notion. But what notion is more romantic than a sad old man finding companionship with a young French beauty? What love story is more prosaic than the man who treats his woman badly because he is masking sadness and fear? "Movie love" may indeed be artificial, but Last Tango in Paris is nothing if not a fractured, perverted version of movie love, a film full of its own virtue but nonetheless crippled by the artifice of its hollow ambition.

Aka Ultimo tango a Parigi.