When Film Forum showed “Last Tango in Paris” this past December, as part of a Marlon Brando retrospective, the venue’s web page for the screening included a note stating that “lead actress Maria Schneider revealed in 2007 that a sexually humiliating scene was conceived off-script by director Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando together, without informing her in advance,” and encouraging viewers to inform themselves about the controversy, the stars, and the director. Yet, when the same theatre showed the film as recently as 2015, there was no such note, even though Schneider, who died in 2011, at the age of fifty-eight, had spoken publicly about what she suffered years before. What changed? Her ordeal became a cause célèbre, thanks to a remarkable memoir, “Tu T’Appelais Maria Schneider,” by one of her cousins, the French journalist and novelist Vanessa Schneider. Published in France in 2018, the book gained wider acclaim here when it came out in English, in 2023, with the title “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” in a translation by Molly Ringwald. (A pre-publication excerpt ran in The New Yorker.) Vanessa Schneider’s trenchant account not only deals with the notorious scene in question—which depicts anal rape—but also details much other mistreatment that her cousin endured on the set, and bears witness to aftereffects that she endured for the rest of her life. With the book’s publication, the abuse of Maria Schneider by Bertolucci and Brando was no longer just a footnote in an obituary or an outrage among the cognoscenti; it finally assumed its rightful place as the story of the film itself.
Now a French movie, “Being Maria,” based on the book, is opening in the U.S., this Friday. Directed by Jessica Palud and released in France last year, it is a straightforward dramatization of events that Vanessa Schneider describes, along with some that come from Palud’s own research. What it lacks is the voice of the author. As the book’s French title suggests—it means “Your Name Is Maria Schneider”—Vanessa Schneider writes in the first person and addresses her cousin in the second person throughout. She ranges freely through her own experience and knowledge, breaking the lockstep of chronology and conjuring her personal relationship with the actress in boldly subjective ways. By contrast, “Being Maria” offers no notable sense of form or of authorial perspective in reconstructing the events of Maria Schneider’s life. It’s a drama of investigative reporting and personal passion that elides the book’s mode of evocation, inquiry, and personal connection. As a creative work, it’s mild, but it’s audacious nonetheless, and its audacity lies in its very existence—its dramatization of the making of one of the most famous (and, now, infamous) movies of all time, its portrayal of two of the greatest actors of all time, and its reconstruction of the scene of a moral crime and the crime’s agonizing aftermath.
“Being Maria” straightens out, rushes through, and simplifies the story that’s told in the book. Maria (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) is first seen at the age of fifteen, living with her hardworking but volatile mother, Marie-Christine (Marie Gillain). When Maria contacts her biological father, the famous actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal), who has not publicly acknowledged paternity, her mother indignantly throws her out of the house. Daniel introduces Maria to his movie-world friends, she’s enticed, she gets an agent, and then, at the age of nineteen, she is cast—as a virtual unknown—by Bernardo Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) in “Last Tango,” which was filmed in early 1972. It premièred at the New York Film Festival in October and was released in France and Italy in December.
“Last Tango” is the story of a twenty-year-old woman named Jeanne (Schneider), who is dating a young filmmaker named Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud). While apartment hunting, she meets a forty-five-year-old American expatriate named Paul (Brando) in a vacant flat, and they begin a sexual relationship there. They meet there daily for sex, but, at Paul’s insistence, they neither learn each other’s names nor speak of their lives outside those walls. Before long, this relationship turns emotionally and physically violent. Meanwhile, Tom proposes to Jeanne and she accepts, deciding to break away from Paul. Paul tries to stay with her, leading to a romantically desperate finale that gives the movie its title.
Pointedly, in “Being Maria,” when Maria meets Bernardo, he asks if, having read the script, she is concerned by how often she’ll be naked on camera. Her answer is “It depends,” and she asks about the scripted sex scenes. He explains that they’ll be filmed “as artistically as possible. But you mustn’t forget, it’s the subject of the film: an intense physical relationship.” Maria accepts the role; because of her age, Christine has to sign a waiver, and Maria is next seen witnessing a scrum of paparazzi besieging Marlon Brando (played by Matt Dillon) on location. Soon, in the apartment, Bernardo is filming a scene in which the naked Maria is taking a bath and the dressed Marlon washes her and then—improvising—shoves her head into the water, upsetting the actress but pleasing Bernardo, who approvingly tells Marlon, “The physical relationship must be violent.”
What follows is a scene that’s by far the best written in “Being Maria.” (Palud wrote the script with Laurette Polmanss.) Tellingly, it’s one that is not in Vanessa Schneider’s book. Maria compliments Marlon on his previous day’s performance, saying that, when he cried, she thought he wasn’t acting but really crying. Marlon replies that he was indeed not acting: “In real life, I don’t cry. . . . But here, that one, he got me to reveal things that I’m not comfortable talking to anybody about. He pulled it out of me.” He adds, regarding his Actors Studio training, “I always hated it—the lie, the deception. But yesterday I hated the truth more.” What this paean to the painful truth of spontaneous performance sets up, of course, is the scene that’s the crux of the new movie and of the real-life Schneider’s experience of the original one: the scene in which Paul holds Jeanne face down on the floor, pulls down her pants, and, using butter as a lubricant, anally rapes her.
As Palud’s film makes clear, that scene wasn’t in the original script of “Last Tango.” (Bertolucci later claimed that the actress was aware of “the violence,” but wasn’t alerted to the use of butter.) Maria in the film, like Schneider in real life, is shocked and outraged, and, as the camera rolls, she cries and resists. Although, as Schneider confirmed, the act was simulated in the original shoot, with no penetration, what viewers of “Last Tango” see as the character’s response is in fact the actress’s own pain and rage. In Palud’s film, Maria leaps up in fury after the take, smashes things on the set, and lies down on a bed, crying. Bernardo tries to console her and defends his methods: “If I’d warned you, you’d have acted—I didn’t want you to act. On my films, there are no actors, no actresses. Only characters.” Then a crew member tells her, for continuity’s sake, to have her pants down in the next shot.
What follows is Maria’s swift and anguished decline. During the shoot of “Last Tango,” word gets out that the film she’s working on is “scandalous” and “vulgar,” and that she’s “always naked.” Soon after the production wraps, Maria begins to use heroin; she gives an interview in which she tells the truth about the shoot, but her agent orders her to censor herself; she becomes the object of hostility and derision, with cries of indecency and catcalls about butter; because of her drug use, she can’t remember her lines and is fired from a new project. In a later interview with a feminist scholar (Céleste Brunnquell), Maria characterizes Bernardo’s method: “For him Jeanne was humiliated, not me. Except Jeanne’s tears were mine. For that scene, I felt like I’d been raped by two men. Marlon and Bertolucci.” Maria goes to rehab, continues to struggle with addiction, and enters into a loving relationship with the caring and sympathetic scholar. “Being Maria” reaches a tenuously serene resolution, ending long before Schneider’s death, that also quietly vents unabated rage at Bertolucci.
The strength of “Being Maria” is its stark, agitprop clarity regarding the connection between the brazenly abusive shoot of “Last Tango in Paris” and Schneider’s subsequently troubled life and career. The performances in “Being Maria” are as bone-dry as the dramatic arc, and the over-all aesthetic is one of mere adequacy, as if any ornament or beauty or expressive felicity would distract from the function of testimony—the job of delivering a starkly declarative account of an unpunished crime. Thus, though the movie is true to the book, in the sense that it doesn’t contradict its substance and even amplifies some points, it nonetheless shears away fascinating details that don’t fit the narrative.
These details, many of which Maria Schneider herself spoke of in interviews, provide much of the power of Vanessa Schneider’s book, which is both a family story and the story of an era. Schneider comes to an understanding of her cousin’s life (and, indeed, her own) via the medium of cultural history, emphasizing the anarchic, quasi-libertine milieu of Maria Schneider’s childhood and adolescence, her temporary lodging with Brigitte Bardot, her wild night life with her father and his entourage. Apart from a very pared-down outline of that last element, none of this social texture is in Palud’s film. Also omitted are the actress’s conservative politics, both as a teen and as an adult, which might seem a surprising counterpoint, though Vanessa Schneider makes persuasive sense of it: “As is often the case with children raised with blurry boundaries, you fiercely defend the established order.”
Blurry boundaries are at the heart of “Last Tango in Paris,” whose true subject is the lack of a boundary between real life and performance, between the artist and the person. When, in Bertolucci’s film, Jeanne heads to a train station to greet her filmmaker-boyfriend, Tom, he surprises her (and infuriates her) with a crew on hand that’s filming their real-life love story. She’s supposed to be herself on camera with him, but quickly finds herself performing for it. She plays along for a while but eventually rebels: “You are taking advantage of me. . . . The film is finished, understand? I’m tired of being raped!” Tom confronts her and hits her; she hits him back, and they tussle but end up in an embrace. Bertolucci’s parodistic view of Tom’s planned docufiction mocks the notion that real life can be captured by merely pointing a camera at it; while filmed, people’s social identities take over and they deliver calculated performances. In order to achieve the spontaneity and authenticity that Tom could never get, Bertolucci, in real life, on the set, didn’t merely surprise Schneider but shocked her—didn’t only film her as herself but filmed her in situations that overrode consciousness to leave her utterly defenseless, emotionally as well as physically.
When Jeanne is with Paul, in the confines of the anonymous apartment, the situation is reversed: rather than becoming characters for each other, they blank themselves out. Paul justifies his demand that they not divulge their names or talk about their lives by calling such storytelling “bullshit.” Stripped not just of their clothes but of their civic, familial, and personal identities, they lay bare their feral essences, too. By freeing their sexual beings from their social selves, Bertolucci implies, they’ll presumably get to the hidden truths, about themselves and about each other, that society represses; thus their personal liberation is also an act of revolt against the prevailing order. But sexual passions are Janus-faced: the uninhibited emotional extremes of pleasure, tenderness, and ardor are matched by their negative, Sadean counterparts of pain and cruelty, submission and domination. Extremes of sex imply extremes of violence. Bertolucci, with a sincere but facile Freudo-Marxism, imagined a bedroom revolution, a destruction of social identities by means of sexual liberation. Likewise, the Bernardo character, in “Being Maria,” speaks of the “violence” in the couple’s relationship, in their absolute sexuality, as a sort of revolutionary violence.
But Bertolucci failed to see or take responsibility for the fact that revolutionary destruction is destruction nonetheless. He was willing to mete out the violence of revolution but not to share in its risks. Notably, the cinematic style of “Last Tango” is lavish, suave, and smooth, Visconti-lite, elegant without excess. Any claim the film has to being revolutionary is found, rather, in front of the camera, because both Schneider and Brando gave more than any actor should, and because Bertolucci took more from his actors than any director should. (Palud has Bernardo talk of “actors” and “characters”—never simply of people.)
As Vanessa Schneider notes, the actress recognized that Brando, too, felt damaged by the shoot—by Bertolucci’s vampirizing of his personal life. She nonetheless blamed the actor for his complicity with the director, a complicity that Palud’s film makes abundantly clear. And whatever Brando suffered pales beside the physical and emotional agony, and the lasting humiliation, that Schneider endured. Bertolucci’s insistence on stripping away the actorly identities of his stars and extracting their personal lives, on forcing them into positions of physical and emotional vulnerability (and, in Schneider’s case, subjecting her to actual and unexpected violence), destroyed not the characters they played but the people themselves. His abuses weren’t just a matter of the workplace; they’re embedded in the movie’s aesthetic and its ideology. The horror of the production of “Last Tango” is inseparable from the enduring grip that it exerts over viewers and critics alike: it’s nearly a snuff film, and what’s being murdered on camera is a soul. ♦
