When Maria Schneider was a teenager, her father brought her to movie sets. Her first major appearance was in Last Tango in Paris. She subsequently recalled in a 2007 interview that she was convinced to accept the job rather than star in a movie with French actor Alain Delon and that, at the age of 19, she “didn’t understand all of the film’s sexual content.”
She claimed to have “a bad feeling about it all,” but her agency insisted that she couldn’t refuse to work with Marlon Brando, one of the most recognised actors of the 20th century.
The film has a contentious past, especially after the lead actress disclosed in 2007 that director Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando collaborated to create a sexually degrading scene without telling her beforehand.
In a 2013 interview, Bertolucci discussed the incident personally, saying, “I’ve been in a way horrible to Maria, because I didn’t tell her what was going on. Because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated.”
She stated, “That scene wasn’t in the original script. The truth is, it was Marlon who came up with the idea. They only told me about it before we had to film the scene, and I was so angry… I felt humiliated, and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise,” she said. “Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears.”
Jessica Palud, the director of Being Maria, told the BBC that this intense scene “couldn’t be avoided” in her movie, as Schneider’s point of view is presented to the audience. “I couldn’t avoid shooting this scene because it was the very moment in which her life completely switches. Everything goes wrong from there,” Palud says. “It was important to have the scene from her point of view, in her body, in her gaze, what she went through, and the fact that there were witnesses. Maria was being assaulted in the presence of the whole crew, who were observing and not reacting.”
Even the actor Marlon Brando faced the traumatic consequences of shooting that scene. Christian, his son, later disclosed that his father experienced a depressive episode during the filming due to emotional weariness and remorse. Brando acknowledged that he was unable to view the completed movie because it was “too full of pain.” He likened it to unlocking a door that he had closed his entire life. He once remarked, “Reality doesn’t have a filter. You can’t take it back once you let it out.”
After the most difficult scenes, Maria Schneider recalls Brando making an effort to calm her. He told her, “We’re going to be tied together in this forever,” which she saw as both confidence and admission. However, the harm had already been done. In addition to its content, the film’s history is complicated by the immense sorrow it caused those who appeared in it.
