Between Maria Schneider and Bernardo Bertolucci, Whose Truth Matters More?
The truth is that the world of filmmaking is messy and always has been. You can't invite dozens of passionate, emotional artists into a room and expect them to all work together without some degree of tension. Best case scenario it’s a positive tension – something that pushes everybody forward towards one goal. Being a part of any collaborative art is to expect and accept some level of discomfort; whether that's in learning how to communicate your vision to others, collaborating and compromising for the greater whole, or being forced to work outside of your comfort zone. The creation of real art is inherently challenging. It's not compatible with the sort of corporate HR guidelines that have brainwashed modern culture into expecting everything to stay in its pre-decided lanes – and it shouldn't be.
Of course, that said, the pursuit of great art is also an unacceptable excuse for forcing cruelty, humiliation, sexual abuse or psychological torture on others. Jessica Palud's Being Maria (2024) investigates this boundary between truth and art by turning the spotlight on the life of French actor Maria Schneider (Anamaria Vartolomei). The film starts in her teenage years, following as she pursues a career in acting after reconnecting with her birth father, a successful actor himself, and is then subsequently thrown out of her home by her controlling mother. Shot to fame through her role in Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial Last Tango in Paris, Schneider soon becomes notorious for speaking out against the sexual assault she experienced on set at the hands of Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) and co-star Marlon Brando (Matt Dillon, in a rather brilliant bit of casting). Their betrayal, and the public’s largely unsympathetic reaction, leaves her feeling vulnerable and paranoid, eventually leading her to hard drugs as a way to cope with life. While director Jessica Palud's film addresses the Last Tango… incident explicitly – recreating the shoot day and Schneider's experience minute by minute in some scenes – she commits to painting a full picture of her subject as more than simply a pitiable victim or a 'difficult woman.'
Based on a memoir by her cousin and the director’s own experience working with Bernardo Bertolucci, Being Maria spends much of its run time on her life outside of her acting career. While her assault looms large throughout the film, it’s far from the only pain she suffered; from her unstable upbringing with an emotionally abusive mother – herself having felt used and abandoned by both Maria's father and Maria – to her time in a mental institution receiving shock therapy for depression and heroin addiction, to her own transformation into a physical abuser towards her loving partner, Noor (Céleste Brunnquell). Palud understands that Maria's life is a story of nuance, not neatly summed up by loud, headline fodder declarations. Even Palud’s portrayal of the Last Tango in Paris set seems to defy singular conclusions; when Maria compliments Brando on his realistic crying in a previous scene, he tells her it wasn't acting – Bertolucci's relentless directing style managed to drag real tears out of him, "that bastard."
That Palud chose this conversation to set the stage for her portrayal of Maria's assault – itself bookended by Bertolucci expressing his desire to depict an emotional truth and an ominous warning that "I told you I wanted it intense” – is a pointed choice. This ‘pursuit of truth’ excuse is a recurring motif when it comes to tales of abuse on set; directors wanting to show something 'real,' pushing their actors past their limits in order to achieve it, and then justifying their questionable process by pointing to the results. Brando chooses to accept this psychological torture as a cruel necessity, a choice Maria is unable to consent to after he perpetuates Bertolucci’s abuse on her physically. “Don't worry, it's just a movie” Brando says after Maria leaves the set in tears.
Which brings us back to the question at the heart of it all: what exactly does "the truth" mean when you're working in a manufactured environment? Do you have to see another person in actual fear in order to feel fear yourself?
In the case of Bertolucci, what he called the pursuit of truth was in fact just the pursuit of power – a desire to control both how his actors felt and how his audience felt. And what good is 'truth' in this context anyhow, when your audience is entering with the expectation that they're watching a film, already cloaked in a layer of disbelief. Bertolucci’s scene is memorable and disturbing, even more so after you learn the truth behind it. But watching this scene recreated in Being Maria, itself scripted, rehearsed multiple times, and made with the use of an intimacy coordinator, feels as haunting as Bertolucci's original, if not more so. Palud focuses on long, claustrophobic takes of Maria's tearful facial expressions, close ups of Brando's breath on her neck as he holds her down with his body, and the stoic, unconcerned faces of the entire crew watching as she screams and cries. That Bertolucci felt the only way to get such a natural reaction out of Maria Schneider was to betray her trust by directing Brando to violate her bodily autonomy, simply falls apart in comparison.
Which of course brings us to the question of who’s to say that Bernardo Bertolucci’s fictional truth in any way matters more than Maria Schneider’s personal truth. That she was unable to give consent to what was happening in the scene is inexcusable both on a moral level and in a professional capacity. Just because she signed onto a film with multiple nude scenes, does not give the director carte blanche to abuse her body in the name of fulfilling his vision. Just as her character Jeanne does not deserve to be raped despite having entered into an unusual sexual relationship with Paul, there's no excuse for the way both of these men decided to violate Maria Schneider simply because she accepted a role in a film. Nor does the perceived brilliance or intentions of her fellow filmmakers and the finished film cancel out the truth of what happened to her.
Ironically, Bertolucci's filmmaking choices led to multiple misunderstandings and rumors about the film, none of which were actually true. From its banishment in Italy, to the long standing rumor that the notorious butter scene involved un-simulated sex, to the public’s treatment of Maria Schneider as a willing sex symbol. Interestingly, Jessica Palud's film has been generating its own level of controversy, with multiple audience reviews on Letterboxd calling out her choice to recreate Maria's sexual assault on screen as its own form of betrayal. The more layers that get peeled back, the further and further from the truth we seem to find ourselves.
Which brings us back to the role of truth in art. The beauty of film is that it is a carefully manufactured way to help us to isolate and recognize emotional truths in ourselves and the world around us. And emotional truths are as messy as the human beings who contain them. What happened to Maria Schneider is abhorrent, and clearly haunted her for the rest of her life – sexual assault has no acceptable place on set or in life. That said, her life is not as black and white as some of the incidents that make it up. To dismiss her as only a victim is to erase large swaths of her work, her dignity and her truth. We must find a way to wrestle with the fact that sometimes art, like people, can be terrible and great at the same time.
