As the gods so the conventions: a reading of Last Tango in Paris

Abstract

In this essay we propose a new interpretation of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972); starting from the Nietzschean categories of Apollonian and Dionysian, we would like to approach the topicality of both the socio-political and existential themes considered in the movie. In the analysis of the relationship between the social conventions that rule the dominant culture and the excess of life that gives itself as an irreducible rest, the stake is a possible emancipation from the logic of consensus.