On October 15, 1972, French actress Maria Schneider woke up to find herself the most talked about woman in America. The film in which he starred, Last Tango in Paris, premiered at the New York Film Festival the night before and quickly gained notoriety.
Their distributor, United Artists – an expert at courting controversy after previous experiences with the Oscar-winning, It goes beyond what audiences expect from mainstream cinema. No wonder tickets are sold to the curious or the lustful for $100 each.
The events leading up to the premiere of Last Tango in Paris and Schneider’s reluctant involvement in the film’s most famous moment—a butter-assisted depiction of sodomy between Schneider and the film’s star, Marlon Brando, increasingly resemble a rape scene. Rather than a love scene, it was made into a movie called Being Maria, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Starring Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando, initial critical consensus was that the film focuses more on the events during and immediately after the making of Last Tango in Paris than it does on portraying the rest of Schneider’s tragic and disappointing life. that it is strong. He continued acting until his death in 2011 at the age of 58, but rarely had the same impact as his most famous role.
There were rumors throughout Schneider’s career that she was “difficult”, the kiss of death when it came to a sustainable professional life, especially since an actress could no longer be marketed as a master person. Although the success of his most famous film led to him being offered a variety of high-profile roles, he was paid much less than either of them due to the hurt and humiliation he suffered at the hands of both Bertolucci and Brando. The men made millions when she became a box office sensation, leading her to heroin addiction and suicide attempts. The picture that made her famous was the poisonous chalice of all: As one of her friends, Esther Anderson, said: “That movie ruined her life.”
By the beginning of 1971, Bertolucci was eager to capitalize on the success he had achieved with earlier films such as The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem, about a character’s incompetence and a timid man’s descent into a politically motivated assassination. to escape the legacy of his antifascist martyr father. Both films featured intense performances from the male protagonists, a dream-like atmosphere, and shocking moments of violence; all of which can be found in Last Tango in Paris; However, the new movie will push the boundaries much further than the previous ones.
The director was only in his early 30s, but he was already a notable filmmaker, and the actors were eager to work with him. Marlon Brando, who was on the rise after his performance in The Godfather, was not Bertolucci’s first choice for the leading role in his new film. His initial plan for the casting was to reunite The Conformist leads Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda, but Trintignant was, in Bertolucci’s words, “beyond shy” and almost in tears informed the director that he could not make the job. “à poil” or naked on the screen.
Sanda was pregnant, so she was eliminated and Bertolucci went to the two leading European men of the time, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Belmondo found the script offensive and, in Bertolucci’s words, “a dash of obscenity”, and Delon would only agree to take on the role if he could also serve as producer; The director flatly denied this. Then, by pure chance, Bertolucci was having dinner in Rome with the Italian head of Paramount, who had spoken highly of Brando’s performance in The Godfather, and the director thought “yeah, that’s the one.”
But Schneider was elected in more convoluted circumstances. Bertolucci offered the role to then-European actress Catherine Deneuve—perhaps with the memory of her performance in Belle de Jour in mind—and she initially accepted, but backed out when she learned she was pregnant.
Schneider, then 19, had yet to land a leading role, let alone the role of Jeanne, a young Parisian woman who meets Brando’s middle-aged widow Paul for equally anonymous matches in an unnamed apartment. sex. She was the estranged daughter of Daniel Gélin, a well-known French actor, who later said: “Even before my experiences in Last Tango, I had difficulty trusting men. “I only met my father when I was 15, and the role models in my family were all women.” His experiences in the film would further strengthen this insecurity.
While it’s easy to understand why an ambitious actress would want to take on a potentially star-making role, there was something unpleasant and exploitative about the project from the start. Bertolucci was open to writing a script based on his own erotic fantasies, and spent considerable time having Brando tailor the actor’s role to his own specifications. The director encouraged Brando to make the role an extension of himself. Brando later wrote in his memoirs: “Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. “He wanted me to play myself, improvise completely, and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of mine… he had me write almost all of my scenes and dialogue.”
No such tolerance was shown to Schneider. She was just “the girl” and given minimal instruction. Although she later claimed in a 2007 interview that she was comfortable with the film’s boundary-pushing sexual content – “nudity wasn’t a problem for me in those days, because I thought it was beautiful” – she was horrified when Bertolucci suggested she and Brando marry. Have actual sex on set to increase the film’s level of authenticity. Fortunately, Brando refused on the grounds that “it would completely change the picture and make our genitals the focal point of the story.”
But working with the director was an unpleasant experience at the best of times. As Schneider later recounted, Bertolucci “was fat and sweaty and very manipulative towards both Marlon and me, and would do things to get a reaction out of me. Some mornings he would be very polite on set and say hello, and other days he wouldn’t say anything at all.” ”
But the worst was yet to come. The pivotal sex scene wasn’t in the script he signed, but instead came up as an idea (some might call it a fantasy) of Brando’s. Schneider was angry at having to do this, stating that he was only told about it minutes before shooting began and that “I should have called my agent or brought my lawyer to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that difficult.” “It’s not in the script, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
Brando did his best to console her, saying, “Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,” during the filming of the exploitative and still hard-to-watch scene. However, Schneider cried uncontrollably during filming; The tears on the screen are completely real. When it was over she felt humiliated and to be honest I felt a little raped by both Marlon and Bertolucci. After the incident, Marlon neither consoled me nor apologized. Fortunately, there was only one take.” Bertolucci was unrepentant, later saying: “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react in a humiliated way.”
When Schneider eventually attended the film’s premiere, he had not yet seen the picture and his reaction was visceral. Esther Anderson, who was with him, later recalled: “He was absolutely shocked. He had no idea what to do with it. “She ran out of the cinema screaming and I had to run out after her and console her.”
Things soon deteriorated. A special case was opened in Italy by Bologna prosecutor Gino Paoli Latin for “obscene content that offends public morals” and “masturbation, lascivious acts and lewd nudity are described and performed off-screen, accompanied by sounds and sighs.” and screams of climatic pleasure”. It was initially unsuccessful, but in September 1973 the appeals court in Bologna sentenced Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider to two months in prison and a fine: this decision was later overturned by the Supreme Court, the country’s highest court, in December of the same year.
However, it was clear that the film had caused a severe attack in Bertolucci’s hometown, and the stress had driven Schneider to extremes. He later said in an interview that the argument “driven me crazy”. I got into drugs – marijuana, then cocaine, LSD and heroin – it was like an escape from reality… I didn’t like being famous at all and drugs were my escape. “I took pills to commit suicide, but I survived because God decided it wasn’t my time to go.”
The fact that he was openly bisexual didn’t help his newfound lascivious reputation, even if he had now come to reject any roles that required nudity. In 1975 he starred opposite Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni’s existential classic The Passenger, but otherwise struggled to escape Last Tango’s considerable shadow for the rest of his life and career.
Today, everyone from Martin Scorsese to Brad Pitt has praised Brando’s performance in the film, with Scorsese describing the role as “the purest poetry imaginable with dynamic movement.” Pitt said that this was the role he wanted to play the most and said: “Brando. This hurts.” Schneider was relatively ignored; This is a topic that Being Maria addresses, albeit belatedly.
There had been a previous attempt to film their experiences in a miniseries planned for 2021, to be written by Jeremy Miller and Daniel Cohn, and José Padilha, one of the directors attached to the project, said: “Tango tells the story of two men having sex with a young and inexperienced woman.” They did it on camera, and the resulting scene turned it into a major feature film, acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, while Maria’s pain was ignored.” The series did not come to fruition, but eventually viewers will know the truth.
It may have been a consolation to him that Hollywood united against Bertolucci in the following years. He is now viewed, with some justification, as a dirty old man rather than an auteur, and as Jessica Chastain said of Last Tango, “Shout out to everyone who loved this movie; You are watching a 19 year old movie. A 48-year-old old man was raped. old man. The director planned his attack.”
Later in his life, Schneider went to a film festival that Bertolucci also attended. Organizers tried to arrange an impromptu meeting between the director and the star, but he refused. “I don’t know that man,” he said.