Like so many women in the 1970s however, she was actually a victim of a sexual revolution played out largely for male pleasure. At the time, Schneider was held up as a boho role model: bisexual and beautiful, with her flowers, hats and furs.
With its brilliant Francis Bacon credits, Parisian backdrop and Gato Barbieri soundtrack, the film was peak 1970s avant garde.
Many critics also saw the film as liberating. In the film, women are the props for male catharsis. It was based on a sexual fantasy of Bertolucci’s, with Brando’s character acting out the trauma of his wife’s suicide through emotionally and physically dominating a much younger woman.
#Last tango in paris butter scene movie
The great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael said the film “altered the face of an art form” and described it as the most “powerfully erotic movie ever made”. And she couldn’t live with the consequences. But she was frightened and powerless to stop what happened on the set. Schneider was not raped, as some have been saying. ‘Last Tango was hailed as revolutionary.’ Photograph: Hulton GettyĬonsent is the key word in this story. I wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and the humiliation. “I didn’t want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage. “I think you have to be completely free,” he has said in interviews. In her 40s she campaigned for better roles in the industry for women.īertolucci remains revered. She refused ever to do nude scenes again and couldn’t deal with the aftermath of the way she was treated and defined by that film. In the years after the filming, she had a breakdown, made attempts at suicide and fell into drug addiction. Last Tango in Paris is a movie about male trauma, but it was Schneider who was left traumatised by it. Bertolucci said in the interview he had no regrets apparently. Bertolucci must also have known this - but they simply lived in a world where men like them could, in the name of “art”, hurt and terrorise women. Brando who was 48 must have known this was deeply unethical. Schneider died of cancer in 2011, and in an interview years after making the film, she said she, “should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script, but at the time, I didn’t know that”. As a result, the clip is suddenly causing outrage, with many on social media, including big Hollywood names such as Jessica Chastain, Anna Kendrick and Chris Evans, condemning this rape scene, directed without one of the actors’ consent. Last month, a Spanish organisation uploaded this edited clip of Bertolucci to draw attention to gendered violence.
In 2013, in a video interview, Bertolucci said he felt guilty for not telling her about the butter, then appeared to casually shrug off this abuse by saying he did not regret his decision to shoot the scene. Brando and the film’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci, conspired to shoot the scene without telling her what was going to happen. For years, she made public what happened during the making of that 1972 movie. She was being humiliated in real life and on screen and she knew it. “I was crying real tears,” Schneider once said.
Those big cinematic heaves are not acting. T he panic and terror on Maria Schneider’s face in the infamous “ get the butter” scene in Last Tango in Paris, in which she is depicted being anally raped by Marlon Brando, is absolutely real, even if the rape is not.
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