On Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the question of how to watch a great film that was made badly.

Last Tango in Paris is a film whose production involved actions that were harmful to its lead actress, Maria Schneider. This is documented and she described the experience clearly before her death. The film was made the way it was made and the making caused harm.

The formal achievement of the film is real: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography, the sustained quality of Brando's performance, the film's willingness to depict adult emotional life with a directness that commercial cinema rarely attempts.

The question of how to watch a film made this way does not have a clean answer. Refusing to engage with the film treats Schneider's work as irrelevant — she gave a performance that is also extraordinary. Engaging with the film without acknowledging its production history is dishonest.

The best approach I've found is the one Susan Sontag pointed toward in a different context: to hold the aesthetic achievement and the ethical failure simultaneously, without using one to cancel the other. This is uncomfortable. It is supposed to be uncomfortable.