Maria Schnyder and Marlon Brando in the film “Last Tango in Paris” Photo: Alami
On October 15, 1972, French actress Maria Schneider woke up and woke up. turns out to be the most talked about woman in America. The film in which she starred, Last Tango in Paris, which premiered the night before at the New York Film Festival, immediately became notorious.
Its distributors United Artists – experts at stirring up controversy after previous experience with the Oscar-winning X-rated prostitution drama Midnight Cowboy – did not hold press screenings but made it clear that Bernardo Bertolucci's new film contains scenes that encourage sexual violence. the envelope exceeds what audiences have ever expected from mainstream cinema. Not surprisingly, tickets were sold to the curious and lusty for $100 apiece.
The events leading up to the premiere of Last Tango in Paris and Schneider's reluctant participation in the film's most controversial moment – a greasy depiction of sodomy between Schneider and the film's star Marlon Brando that increasingly looks like a rape scene. than the love scene – has now been made into the film Being Mary, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Starring Anamaria Bartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando. Critics agree that the film is stronger when it concentrates on the events during and immediately after the filming of Last Tango in Paris than when it portrays the rest. about Schneider's tragic and disappointed life. She continued acting until her death in 2011 at age 58, but rarely to the same effect as her most famous role.
Anamaria Bartolomei and Matt Dillon in the film “Being Mary”
Throughout Schneider's career, there have been rumors that she is a “difficult” person – the kiss of death when it comes to a stable professional life, especially when the actress is no longer positioned as an ingénue. Although the success of her most famous film led to her being offered many high-profile roles, the pain and humiliation she suffered at the hands of Bertolucci and Brando, for which she received a significantly lower salary than either of these two men, who earned millions when it became a box office sensation and drove her to heroin addiction and suicide attempts. The picture that made her famous became a real poisoned chalice: as one of her friends, Esther Anderson, said: “That film ruined her life.”
In early 1971, Bertolucci sought to build on the success of his previous films, including The Conformist and The Spider's Catch, which were respectively about a shy man committing a politically motivated murder and a character's inability to escape his father's legacy. -anti-fascist martyr. Both films featured intense performances from male leads, dreamlike atmospheres and moments of shocking violence, all of which can be found in Last Tango in Paris, but the new film pushed the boundaries much further than its predecessors.
The director was only about 30 years old, but he was already an outstanding director, and actors were eager to work with him. Marlon Brando, then at the peak of his popularity after his role in The Godfather, was not Bertolucci's first choice for the lead role in his new film. His original casting plan was to reunite his leading actors from The Conformist, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sand, but Trintignant was, according to Bertolucci, “beyond shy” and almost in tears informed the director that he could not to be “à poil”, or naked, on screen.
Sanda was pregnant, so she was excluded, and Bertolucci turned to two leading European men of the time, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Belmondo found the script offensive and, according to Bertolucci, “obscene”, and Delon would only agree to take on the role if he could also act as a producer, which the director categorically refused. Then, quite by chance, Bertolucci found himself in Rome at a dinner with the Italian head of Paramount, who was delighted with Brando's performance in The Godfather, and the director thought: “Yes, this is the one.”
Schneider, however, played under more complicated circumstances. Bertolucci offered the role to then-European actress Catherine Deneuve – perhaps with her role in Les Beauties in mind – and she initially accepted, but turned it down when she discovered she was pregnant.
The then 19-year-old Schneider had yet to take on a leading role, let alone one as demanding as that of Jeanne, a young Parisian who meets Brando's middle-aged widower Paul in an anonymous apartment for an equally anonymous showdown. sex. She was the former daughter of famous French actor Daniel Gelin and later said: “Even before my experience in Last Tango, I found it difficult to trust men. I only met my father when I was 15, and all my family role models were women.” Her experience working on the film only reinforced this mistrust.
Maria Schneider. Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci on the set of Last Tango in Paris. Photo: Getty
While it's easy to understand why an aspiring actress would want to take on a potentially star-making role, there was something distasteful and exploitative about the project from the start. Bertolucci spoke openly about writing a script based on his own erotic fantasies, and spent a lot of time with Brando, honing the actor's role to his own specifications. The director encouraged Brando to turn the role into an extension of himself. Brando later wrote in his memoirs: “Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. He wanted me to play myself, completely improvise and portray Paul as if he were my autobiographical mirror… he had me write almost all my scenes and dialogue.”
Schneider was not granted such leniency. She was just a “girl” and was given minimal guidance. Although she later said in a 2007 interview that she was cool with the film's sexual content – “nudity wasn't a problem for me in those days because I thought she was beautiful” – she was taken aback when Bertolucci suggested that she and Brando have sex for real on set to enhance the authenticity of the film. Brando, fortunately, refused on the grounds that “it would have completely changed the picture and made our genitals the center of the story.”
But working with the director was an unpleasant experience at the best of times. As Schneider later recalled, Bertolucci was “fat, sweaty and very manipulative of both Marlon and me, and did certain things to get a reaction from me. Some mornings on set he would be very nice and say hello, and other days he wouldn't say anything at all.”
Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the film “Last Tango in Paris” Photo: Alamy
However, the worst was yet to come. The central sex scene was not included in the script she signed up for, but originated as an idea—some would call it a fantasy—of Brando. Schneider was angry that she had to perform it, saying that she was only told about it moments before filming began and that “I should have called my agent or had a lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that wasn’t in the script, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
Brando did his best to console her during the filming of the exploitative – and still difficult to watch – scene, saying, “Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie.” But Schneider cried uncontrollably during filming; the tears on the screen are completely sincere. After it was over, she felt “humiliated and, frankly, a little raped, both by Marlon and Bertolucci. After this scene, Marlon did not console me or apologize. Fortunately, there was only one take.” Bertolucci was unrepentant, later saying: “I wanted her to react like a girl, not like an actress. I wanted her to react humiliatedly.”
When Schneider finally attended the film's premiere, she had not yet seen the film, and her reaction was visceral. Esther Anderson, who was with her, later recalled that “she was absolutely shocked. She had no idea what they were going to do with her. She ran out of the cinema screaming, and I had to run after her into the street and console her.”
Things soon got worse. Bologna prosecutor Gino Paoli Latin brought an Italian private prosecution on charges of “obscene content that offends public decency” and “descriptions and displays of masturbation, lustful acts and indecent nudity, accompanied by off-screen sounds, sighs.” and cries of climatic pleasure.” It was initially unsuccessful, but in September 1973 the Bologna Court of Appeal sentenced Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider to two months' imprisonment and a fine; the verdict was later overturned by the country's highest court, the Court of Cassation, in December of that year.
“It drove me crazy”: Maria Schneider in the film “Last Tango in Paris” Photo: United Artists/MoviePix
However, it was clear that the film was a grave insult in Bertolucci's homeland, and the stress drove Schneider over the edge. She later said in an interview that the controversy “drove me crazy. I became addicted to drugs – marijuana, and then cocaine, LSD and heroin – it was like an escape from reality… I didn't like fame at all, and drugs were my escape. “I took pills to try to commit suicide, but I survived because God decided it wasn’t time for me to leave.”
Being openly bisexual did not help her newfound reputation as a libidinous woman, even though she now made it a point to refuse any roles requiring nudity. She appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in Michelangelo Antonioni's existential classic The Passenger in 1975, but also spent the rest of her life and career struggling to escape the significant shadow of Last Tango.
Today, everyone from Martin Scorsese to Brad Pitt has praised Brando's performance in the film, with Scorsese calling the role “the purest poetry imaginable, in dynamic motion.” Pitt, meanwhile, said that this is the role he would most like to play, noting: “Brando. It hurts. Schneider was relatively ignored, and now, belatedly, Being Mary addresses this.
Maria Schneider with Italian fashion designer Luciano Soprani, 1997. Photo: AP
There had previously been an attempt to chronicle her experience working on the film in a miniseries planned for 2021, which was to be written by Jeremy Miller and Daniel Cohn, and one of the project's directors, Jose Padilla, said: “Tango tells the story of two men being bullied a young and inexperienced woman not for sex, but for the sake of art. They did it on camera, and the resulting scene became a major feature film, receiving acclaim from critics and audiences alike. The director and actors enjoyed their success, but Maria’s pain went unheeded.” The series did not take place, but now, finally, viewers will know the truth.
Perhaps it was some consolation for her that Hollywood united against Bertolucci in subsequent years. Now, with some justification, he's seen less as an auteur and more as a dirty old man, and as Jessica Chastain said of Last Tango, “To all the people who love that movie, you're watching a 19-year-old. an old man was raped by a 48-year-old. old man. The director planned her attack.”
Schneider later found himself at a film festival, which Bertolucci was also present at. Organizers tried to organize an impromptu reunion between director and star, but she refused. “I don’t know this person,” she said.
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