There are careers that change forever with a film. Some for the better. Julia Roberts saw it all take off thanks to pretty woman; and the casting of Rebels (Matt Dillon, Rob Low and Tom Cruise among others) still have Francis Ford Coppola to thank. Others, however, become slabs impossible to lift. These are titles that remain marked in an industry that only forgives those who want to. Women are generally the most penalized for these types of decisions.
The most tragic example remains that of The last tango in Paris. More than a film, it is a scene which marked and destroyed the career of a young and promising actress, Maria Schneider. She did this because the reactionary hordes of the time were much harsher on her over the scandal surrounding the production than on her film colleagues (in fact, the Oscars nominated Bertolucci and Marlon Brando and forgotten). But above all because in this filming an atrocity was committed when the consent of the performer was violated.
What would be known as “the butter scene” was not in the script. It was Brando and Bertolucci who agreed outside, without anyone knowing. They wanted the terror of Maria Schneider, only 19 years old, to be real. They achieved this by crossing all moral boundaries. She always said it, she said in interviews that she felt “violated”, but no one would listen to her or take action. It was only with the arrival of Me Too and the new feminist revolution that the interviews between her and Bertolucci were saved, where both admitted that this scene was not consensual. It was too late, it ended up hurting a fragile actress, with a traumatic childhood, who found herself mired in addictions and considered a weirdo in the industry.
Schneider is one of those figures to be restored. And cinema assumes it too. There is the biopic about the actress who appeared at Cannes, titled Married and directed by Jessica Palud and which has as a source the personal biography written by her cousin, the journalist Vanessa Schneider. Is called My cousin Maria Schneider, and now Circé editions are publishing it in Spain. The actress’s cousin is building a book where she also tells her story and that of her family. An exercise in autofiction inspired by Annie Ernaux and which they planned to write together before Maria died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 58.
An exercise that gives dignity and reclaims the figure of Maria Schneider. This shows its cracks, its traumas. Also her talent and the roles that were hidden by the shadow of this scene for which she received jokes, sexist comments and which always persecuted her. A moment in the life of the actress which reconstructs and divides her story in two. A difficult moment to write but one that had to be written because of its importance in the future life of her cousin. “Maria was traumatized by this scene and she no longer wanted to talk about it,” Vanessa Schneider remembers without hesitation on the other end of the phone.
“In the family, we couldn’t even pronounce the title of the film. It was forbidden. So it was difficult to write about this moment, because I couldn’t not talk about it The last tango in Paris“, because it was very important in our life and had many consequences, but I also know that she did not want to talk about it”, she adds about the dilemma that the return to this painful moment.
She always said it. She spoke after the film, in interviews, describing what she was going through, and no one cared about her. Now they would have heard it
Vanessa Schneider
— Writer and cousin of the actress
The book recounts how, although she was pioneering in her complaints against industry machismo and spoke out more than once about what happened during that shoot, she was ignored until ‘when Me Too arrived. One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if this had happened today. For Vanessa Schneider, this “could not be possible now, because this scene was not written in the script”. “If you want to change something in the script, you have to talk to the actor and inform him. Thanks to the Me Too movement, producers and directors are very aware of these things,” he says.
Another theme of the book is the mistreatment of Maria Schneider by the press. Find the sexist questions, the interviews where we only wanted to know this scene, the morbidity. They meet an indomitable actress who never gave them what she wanted. A press that sexualized her until the day she died, when Release, the reference newspaper of the left in France, published a photo of her topless.
This is the newspaper that Schneider’s family read, and they did not expect this hard blow: “I was very surprised. A left-wing newspaper, which talks about equality and women’s rights and no one asked if it was indecent. He had just died. There are thousands of beautiful photos of her. Of her face, and they chose one where she was naked. “It was disrespectful, and we all know that if the deceased was an actor, a man, they would never have chosen a photo in which he appears naked.”
She is happy with the film adapting “part of the book”, since it focuses on Maria, ignoring the role of Vanessa and her family. But he believes that both share the same maxim: “restore a kind of dignity”. “She was a strong woman, with personality. A charismatic actress, not a small victim. She was a young woman hurt by her family history and what she experienced, but she always told it. She spoke after the film, in interviews, describing what she was going through, and no one cared about her. Now they would have listened to her,” he says.
Dignity but also justice, because “many people had forgotten Maria and her story, and by putting her back in a book, in the press and in a film, this leads us to ask questions again about the place of women in the world. industry and in society. cinema.” An example of how everything has changed is in the way they filmed the same scene, the one with the butter, 45 years later: “Jessica Palud hired an intimacy coordinator to ensure that Anamaria Vartolomei, the actress who plays Maria, was okay with the scene, and she and Matt Dillon, who plays Marlon Brando, said it was very helpful. That they felt protected and guided. All is not perfect, but there are many improvements.
