In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from “Last Tango in Paris,” a film she had made 11 years earlier. “No,” she said, pleadingly. “I’d rather not.”
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that movie depicts the heated sexual relationship between a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne (Schneider), and an older American expat, Paul (Marlon Brando). What ended up making “Tango” more infamous than famous was a scene in which Paul forces himself on Jeanne, with the help of a smear of butter.
That scene would haunt Schneider, who died at 58 in 2011, the rest of her life. In a 2007 interview, she said that the moment had been sprung upon her with no warning: “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”
It’s easy to see why this posed a moral and ethical problem for the director Jessica Palud, whose new film, “Being Maria,” stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando.
“That was the big question mark when we started writing our film: Do we re-enact the scene or not?” Palud said in a video interview from France. “Everybody I talked to who had known Maria mentioned the trauma caused by that scene, so I just couldn’t avoid it.”
“Being Maria” starts with Schneider observing her father, the well-known French actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) on a set. She is fascinated by the world of filmmaking, and right away we are conscious of the importance of who is watching and who is being watched. When, not long after, the 19-year-old Maria is cast in “Tango” and becomes the focus of attention, Palud felt it was important to continue to concentrate on the woman’s gaze.
“I didn’t want to reproduce Bertolucci’s camera — it’s not a remake of ‘Tango’ — so I tried to change the scene’s point of view and do it from her perspective,” the director said. “So we see her watching the crew, and the crew watching her. Her ‘no’ and her tears are real, she isn’t acting anymore. We see the entire crew just waiting for the director to say ‘cut.’”
Palud (who got into the film industry as a 19-year-old intern on Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” some two decades ago) had secured the original “Tango” screenplay from the Cinémathèque Française archives. She could see for herself that the notorious scene was not in it, confirming Schneider’s version. Naturally, work proceeded very differently on the “Being Maria” shoot, which involved an intimacy coordinator, but the filming was still harrowing for Vartolomei.
“I couldn’t stop crying that day — I think I had completely internalized Maria’s anger, the violence of that scene,” the actress said in a video chat. “Sometimes you tell yourself, ‘Come on, you’d be trying to fight him off.’ But you can’t, it’s a man twice your size and the violence is such that you feel completely alone. That’s when I understood where Maria’s sorrow came from: loneliness.”
“She was so shy that she could close herself off and had an inaccessible side,” Vartolomei added. “She was really mysterious. That’s why we rehearsed a lot — we were trying to find her. I struggled grasping her and even having portrayed her, she remains somewhat mysterious to this day.”
Dillon, reached by phone, was open in his admiration for Brando, who meant a great deal to him as an actor, and he did like “Tango” as a film. But he also acknowledged that something had gone very wrong. “Having started acting at a very young age, I’m very sensitive to the exploitation thing,” Dillon said. “So I had these kind of strange, paradoxical feelings going on.”
The “Tango” episode is a relatively small part of “Being Maria,” but it is clearly pivotal, as it is in the book that inspired the film, “My Cousin Maria Schneider.” In it, the journalist Vanessa Schneider offers an intimate take on an older family member whom she saw regularly while growing up and greatly admired. The book, delicately and affectionately, traces a tragic arc from Maria Schneider’s childhood with a father who only started connecting with her when she was in her teens, through her attempts to shake off “Tango,” her descent into heroin addiction and her efforts to find herself as an actress and as a woman.
“She suffered from what happened on the set and then from what happened when the movie came out,” Vanessa Schneider said via video from France. “For puritanical viewers, she was an easy woman who made pornography. It was brutal for her, especially since it wasn’t at all in her nature — she was pretty modest, reserved and fairly conservative in certain respects.”
After “Tango,” she turned down most scripts involving nudity, her cousin said. “This created a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with,” Vanessa Schneider added. “Then drugs came into the picture and she got this reputation in the industry as someone who wasn’t reliable.”
Schneider’s own favorite among her films was the Michelangelo Antonioni drama “The Passenger” (1975), in which she was magnetic opposite another American star, Jack Nicholson. The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis called it Antonioni’s “greatest film” when it was rereleased in 2005. Whenever an interview would steer her toward “Tango,” Maria Schneider often offered to talk about “The Passenger” instead. Mainly she landed supporting parts, most notably in the 1979 drama “La Dérobade” (“Memoirs of a French Whore” in the United States), for which she was nominated for a César Award (the French equivalent of an Oscar).
Over the decades, a certain mystique has developed around the actress. “It’s a combination of things,” Vanessa Schneider said. “Tango” was “incredibly successful around the world. Entire generations saw it. Maria also had a strong personality, she was charismatic and had an impact on a lot of people.”
“They may not have seen many of her movies,” she continued, “but for a generation she was emblematic thanks to her look, her voice, the way she expressed herself — you could tell she was outside the norm.”
Schneider’s reputation has also been restored thanks to the rediscovery of the directness with which she discussed the manipulations and violations filmmaking can involve, long before #MeToo and cases like the prosecution in the French courts of the director Christophe Ruggia, who was convicted in February of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel, who was a minor at the time.
Commenting on the reaction to her film, Palud said, “Many interviewers in France were telling me, ‘It’s wild, it sounds like something you’d hear in 2024.’” But, she noted, “most of the words in the film are Maria’s. It’s what she said in the 1970s and ’80s.”
This may explain why Schneider seems to be in the zeitgeist. The director Elisabeth Subrin made the César-winning short “Maria Schneider, 1983” (2022), in which three actresses re-enact the TV interview from that year. Last year, feminist groups and individuals asked the Cinémathèque to provide context around a planned screening of “Tango,” which ended up being canceled altogether. And in January, the Parisian one-woman show “Alone Like Maria” drew parallels between the experience of its star, Marilou Aussilloux, and that of Schneider. The late actress is casting a long shadow.
Palud’s film doesn’t cover Schneider’s childhood or years of illness. “I wanted to end on a strong image,” the director explained, with Maria looking at the camera, saying that she’s listening to us (“Je vous écoute”), and, in effect, encouraging us to speak. There was something “almost political” about the scene, Palud added. “My movie is like a report, unadorned: What do we do with this?”
