Brando’s great act of hiding
Shardul Bhardwaj
As patriarch Don Vito Corleone, Marlon Brando in his seminal work The Godfather (1972) has been interpreted as the man who only in the most private moments has let his self be seen by the audience. This act of hiding is in accordance with the role he is playing, a romanticised version of an organised crime lord of the early and mid-1900s in America.
What people have also raved about is the great distaste Brando had for show business and media publicity. His life has become a sort of enigma due to the distance he maintained from the media while he was alive. On the contrary, a performance by Brando in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) gave a glimpse into the person that Brando could have been. It is his great act of revealing. In this story of a man who after his wife’s suicide enters into a sexual relationship with a woman where anonymity is key. In the aftermath of his wife’s suicide, he engages in sometimes violent sexual acts with a girl much younger to him in age. The plotline is not what resembles Marlon Brando’s life. It is the intricacies within the script, which are picked up from Brando’s actual life.
The scene in the film where Brando makes up stories about his childhood as compared to the end of the film where he actually reveals about his life to the girl seems to dwell in a much deeper space within the cosmos of the character. The performance of cooking up stories in this scene about his childhood is where the feeling of loss and loneliness creeps into the ambiguity of fiction that he is trying to create. Marlon Brando’s character cannot escape the interiority of his character’s self, a self which rings true because at that point the distinction between Brando and Brando’s character seem to be getting blurred.
The seeming loss of self, according to dictates of a character, is something that one has heard quite often. Hence in such kind of work, it is important to make the character personal that there should be an unspeakable difference between the actor and character when one sees him or her onscreen. Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Paul seemed to espouse these qualities. This quality is very close to that of a singer or performer. That composition and song writing has to start meaning something deep down for the singer to be able to perform it with any conviction. The mere correct singing of the notes is only half the job done.
Each note and each word mean and sound different to the singer every time ones a song, what does not change is that these songs have to emanate from an emotional core which most often reveals a part of who the singer is at that moment. Marlon Brando has sung the most heartfelt song in the film Last Tango in Paris. It is one of the most complex performances one has seen where there is a performance within a performance while it seems like the most honest self of Marlon Brando screaming its lung out on screen.
