Cinematic, albeit scandalous history was made in 1972 when Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘Last Tango in Paris’ was first screened. Now French filmmaker Jessica Palud, with the help of a book written by Maria Schneider’s cousin, retells the story to finally bring out the heroine in a woman who simply stood up for herself. And, as is often the case for strong yet vulnerable women, lost.
If you call a man problematic, it can be seen as a compliment. He’s complicated, fascinating, a bad boy. Yet if you call a woman that same word, it’s an insult. Or at the very least, a reason to cancel her career, unfriend her and try to minimize her strength. And it is not just men who do this to women, as often the most awful perpetrators of this jealous spite against strong women are, you guessed it, other women.
In a poignant scene from Jessica Palud’s important and beautiful film Being Maria, Anamaria Vartolomei, who plays the young and beautiful Maria Schneider, is told by a woman passing by her table in a restaurant “Mademoiselle, you should be ashamed of yourself!” It is a scene that gave me goosebumps, because until that moment, Schneider had only and ever steadfastly defended herself against abuse, and an ambush she suffered at the hands of her director and co-star. Yet there she is, blamed for their unconscionable actions.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Being Maria begins with the 16-year old aspiring actress wanting to reconnect with her famous father. Schneider was the illegitimate daughter of French movie star Daniel Gélin and Christine Marie Schneider, a wannabe actress who, in the film, seems always jealous of her beautiful daughter. And ever angry at her former lover. The understandable move by young Maria, to want to reconnect with Gélin, enrages the mom, who kicks her daughter out of the house.
Alone and sitting on the cold street, Maria is rescued by her uncle, a kind man with a loving wife and two young children. This is important, as one of those kids, Vanessa, wrote the book on which Palud’s film is based. It is also interesting to note that her book ‘My Cousin Maria Schneider: A Memoir’ was translated into English by actress and writer Molly Ringwald. Talk about strong women recognizing one another — this is one gigantic circle of girl power!
When Maria decides to become an actress herself, she is over the moon at being cast in Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest film, Last Tango in Paris starring mega American star Marlon Brando. I mean, which actress could ever turn down such an opportunity of a lifetime! Everyone involved was betting on Last Tango, including its filmmaker whose work, until that point, had been admired by the critics and discovered by arthouse audiences, yet big success still eluded him. Brando had also just turned 50 and would soon regain his fame thanks to Bertolucci’s film and his turn as the Don Corleone, but he was in full midlife crisis mode.
Ever an auteur, Bertolucci set about making a film about a man and a woman meeting in Paris. These two people, of different backgrounds, generations and hailing from different walks of life, would embark on a relationship based only on sex. Without even disclosing their names to each other, the sexy Schneider and the middle aged Brando played on screen and chatted intimately off screen, in a way that is described perfectly by Palud. It is because she sets up the film and those relationships so well that we get the betrayal, wholeheartedly, as her director and co-star plan an ambush involving butter and an unwritten rape scene. One so real and frightening from the angle it is shot in Being Maria that I physically cringed. And still do now, writing about it.
There is no doubt as to why Schneider — played magnificently by star to watch Vartolomei — finds the magic of the project and what she thought her relationship with these two extraordinary men, both her seniors in age and fame, gone. We, as women, get it, deep down in our deepest corner of our souls. She goes from pristine star to cheap tramp in one split second, without ever having agreed to the change.
Everything that comes after that moment, Palud and her ally Vartolomei explain wholeheartedly, yet in a perfectly cinematic way. It makes sense that Schneider, just 19 at the time the film was shot, would end up making a series of wrong choices following Last Tango. She is not just misguided but also mistreated — by the media, by the Italian courts which find her (along with Bertolucci and Brando) guilty of lewd behavior on film, and by her fellow women. No one stands up for a woman who stands up for herself, that’s the meta message of Being Maria. As someone who has experienced this first hand, the film is a manifesto, a “j’accuse” in support of strong and outspoken women everywhere. And against those who spend their entire lives trying to pull them back down in the bucket of crabs (see what I mean here).
At one point, Maria’s father, played by Yvan Attal tells his daughter a proverb, “Talk bad, talk nice about me, but just talk,” which is similar to that old actors’ saying “in show business, the only bad press is no press at all.” Maria has just been insulted by the woman in the restaurant, while she sits with her father having lunch. Even though in retrospect we, the audience, can see the brilliant future of her career if only she stuck to it, Schneider is of course unaware. She can only do what she knew then and what she knows is strength, yet the kind unaccompanied by wisdom — as is the case for every young woman who is still basically a teenager.
Being Maria also finds teen heartthrob Matt Dillon playing Marlon Brando in a brilliant piece of casting, and Italian actor Giuseppe Maggio playing Bertolucci. The script is written by Palud alongside Laurette Polmanss, loosely based on Vanessa Schneider’s book. It features cinematography by Sébastien Buchmann. World sales for the film are being handled by Studio Canal.
As last words, I have to compliment the Festival de Cannes for world premiering this important work of the seventh art during this edition. Cinema is a world where human gods exist and Bernardo Bertolucci is one of those gods — untouchable and to be supported. That he’s now no longer among the living is an extra card that plays in his favor when it comes to being accountable for one of the most terrifying moments ever experienced by an actress — #metoo and all the things that came after aside.
So, the presence of this film in the intimate and precious setting of the Cannes Premiere lineup, presented by Thierry Frémaux himself, means the world, to strong and problematic women everywhere. We shall continue to occupy our place in the world, whether others like it or not.
Top image by Guy Ferrandis, courtesy of Les Films de Mina, used with permission.