When the French Cinémathèque tried to show Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris” last December as part of a Marlon Brando retrospective, the organizers eventually canceled the screening after vociferous protest from women’s rights groups.
Its infamous rape scene — simulated yet filmed without then-19-year-old star Maria Schneider’s knowledge or consent — has become a #MeToo flashpoint for abusive practices in a male-dominated industry. Decades after making the film, in an interview that stirred new outrage, Bertolucci said that by not telling his female co-lead what he and Brando had devised for the scene, he was ensuring a real response, not a rehearsed one. What went cruelly overlooked was the larger effect of such coercion: lasting trauma for Schneider, whose outspokenness over the years about her experience typically went unnoticed.
Foregrounding that viewpoint is the French film “Being Maria” from director-co-writer Jessica Palud, in which a memorable Anamaria Vartolomei plays Schneider from age 15 to 30-something, and from untested hopeful to jaded survivor. Drawing from a biographical memoir published by Schneider’s cousin seven years after the actor died in 2011, it’s a sensitively handled depiction of what she went through, even as it unsettles our notion of a feminist biopic by framing Schneider’s life as leading up to, and trying to live down, being manipulated and assaulted on camera for the sake of art.
That’s a tricky balancing act for any filmmaker (this is Palud’s second feature), exploring an incident’s psychological toll without further establishing it as the key reason we know someone. But there’s enough of an emotional intelligence inside the bumpier elements of “Being Maria” that the movie effectively acknowledges that it’s only one part of a complicated life story.
When teenage Maria’s interest in film sparks a burgeoning relationship with her distant birth father (movie star Daniel Gélin, played by Yvan Attal), her edgy, judgmental mother (Marie Gillain) kicks her out. At 19, with a few films under her belt, Maria meets white-hot auteur Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio), prepping his upcoming drama about anonymous sex between a young Parisian woman and a middle-aged American to be played by Brando. “You’re an actress, aren’t you?” he asks, a line Maggio imbues with enough charming provocation to suggest that the distinction bores him — it’s her woundedness he’s after.
On set, Maria warms to the playful vulnerability of her iconic co-star, played with soulful intuitiveness by a well-cast Matt Dillon. The “Tango” shoot, from its first hesitant laughs to the provoked tears and rage, is this movie’s longest sequence and it’s a paradoxically casual yet tense marvel of curdling atmosphere, showing how creativity and camaraderie can be warped without any checks on power. Palud, a onetime intern for Bertolucci who obtained an annotated copy of the “Tango” script, re-creates the filming of Schneider’s brazen mistreatment but with a reverse-shot angle, capturing the crew’s queasily placid expressions.
That private humiliation designed for public consumption, an incident that sparked notoriety but rarely any emotional support, is all over Vartolomei’s enveloping, subtly agonized portrayal: distracted, depressed, brittle, standing up for herself professionally when subsequent producers tried to exploit her, but cratering in her peripatetic personal life. A worsening heroin addiction eventually threatens Maria’s relationship with a female lover, Noor (Céleste Brunnquell), whose caring attention is welcome after all that’s transpired.
But the post-“Tango” timeline is also the movie’s choppiest, prone to cliched representations of falling apart (hedonistic club dancing, drug-fueled meltdowns) than what’s knotty or illuminating about Schneider’s particular struggle: to forge one’s own way as a bruised star, bearing a reputation not of one’s choosing.
Palud’s directorial emphasis on that internal experience, guided by a simple shooting style trained on Vartolomei, is what keeps “Being Maria” afloat on its turbulent seas. When Bertolucci filmed her in that awful moment, he was lying to himself about the truth he was after. Palud, on the other hand, by embracing a long-ignored perspective, becomes the intimacy coordinator Schneider never had.
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