Movie Review
Director: Jessica Palud
Writer: Jessica Palud, Laurette Polmanss
Stars: Anamaria Vartolomei, Matt Dillon, Giuseppe Maggio
Synopsis: Maria Schneider, a young, struggling actress, lands her dream role in a film by an emerging Italian director, starring alongside an American superstar. What begins as her big breakthrough quickly turns into a living hell.
“Let the scene lead you,” Bernardo Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) tells Maria Schneider (Anamaria Vartolomei), the ingénue starring alongside the larger-than-life force that is Marlon Brando (Matt Dillon) in the Italian director’s new film, Last Tango in Paris. He doesn’t want to rehearse the scene in question – one in which Brando’s character rapes Schneider’s – not in spite of its intensity, but because of it. Bertolucci wants raw intimacy; “On my films, there are no actors,” he later tells Schneider, noting that he “didn’t want [her] to act,” only to exhibit her true feelings as the scene unfolded. In the decades since production concluded, the film’s leads, the filmmaker himself, and others on the outskirts of the production have had differing accounts as to whether or not the rape was actually in the script. In 2007, Schneider told the Daily Mail that the scene was abruptly added after Brando came up with the idea, while at a 2013 Cinémathèque Française retrospective, Bertolucci claimed that it was performed as it was written. One thing is for sure: the use of butter as a sexual lubricant was nowhere to be found in the script. In addition, though the rape itself was simulated, Brando’s application of the butter and his forcible actions during the take felt authentic to the unsuspecting Schneider, which left her feeling “a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”
There’s more to Jessica Palud’s Being Maria – which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and screened at Film at Lincoln Center’s 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema – but Maria Schneider’s days on the Tango set play a more pivotal role in the film than any other, much like its consideration in Schneider’s life and career. The French star, who was 19 when she filmed Tango and 58 when she died of cancer in 2011, suffered abuse and used drugs in response to the instant fame she obtained following her breakout, and Being Maria goes to reasonable lengths in its efforts to paint the full picture of a life in the limelight. But it’s admittedly difficult to latch onto everything else Palud’s biopic attempts to mine from the aftermath of the aforementioned trauma, not least because of how vivid and harrowing the director’s depiction of that on-set assault is. Both what precedes and follows one extended moment in this movie is an uninvolved glance at the booklet of biopic tropes, disappointingly so. Much like what Brando tells Schneider right before action is called on the now-infamous incident, “It’s only a film.”
The one person who understands that sentiment to greater heights than anyone else in Being Maria is Vartolomei, whose own burgeoning star and seemingly endless range are put to great use in the titular role. The French actor, who recently stole a few scenes in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 but should be better remembered for turning in one of 2021’s best performances in Audrey Diwan’s Happening, likely called upon that breakout to inform this part given its psychologically unrelenting similarities, though it feels as though she’s evolving in real time here. Expressive and entrancing, Vartolomei is never once overshadowed by Dillon’s Brando, perhaps because the actor’s hair and smirk are about as close as he gets to the complex, venerated legend of stage and screen, but in actuality, it’s because she’s a presence unto herself. You can feel Vartolomei actively embodying Schneider’s conflicted gamut of emotions while filming Tango, the nature of acting while feeling truly broken as she inhabits a “part.” That she and Dillon have a real chemistry is indicative of how Schneider said she felt in his orbit prior to the scene that altered their professional relationship: “There was no attraction between us. For me, he was more like a father figure and I a daughter.”
Aside from what occurred on Bertolucci’s film, the relationship between Schneider and her family is much of what Palud and co-writer Laurette Polmanss lend their focus to. Working from Vanessa Schneider’s 2018 memoir, “My Cousin Maria Schneider” – great SEO, to be fair – Being Maria attempts to create dramatic tension from estrangement, though those links aren’t nearly as fleshed out as what the film is clearly most interested in. It doesn’t help that the first time we see Maria, she’s watching her father, the French actor and director Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal), as he directs a film of his own; this seems to be the beginning and end of their bond, one that is more professional than it is personal. Of course, that was partially due to the fact that Maria was the result of an affair and thus could not be recognized as his daughter, and partially because Maria’s mother (Marie Gillain) wanted Maria to have no contact with him. But it’s one thing to interrogate the turmoil that such discord could cause and another thing entirely to accept it on its terms, finding alternate ways to examine why this ultra-green actress just might have some daddy issues. Brando and Bertolucci, as much blame as they deserve for the torment Schneider endured for the remainder of her life given their actions towards her, are positioned as fuel to Maria’s fatherless fire. It’s no wonder that Gélin appears in so few scenes yet is mentioned in so many, as a tale of a young woman’s tribulation can never be about her suffering alone, but about who caused it and why.
There’s some merit to that: Men should be held accountable for the pain they inflict on women, no matter the circumstances nor their claims that calls for accountability should fall anywhere but on their shoulders. And Palud understands that, but only to a point. Being Maria spends a lot of time portraying Schneider in pain and enduring ridicule and criticism from the press, audiences, and friends alike, yet in doing so, it remains intent on repeating one refrain: “You wanted this.” It’s a common idea to include in a film about young artists who struggle, either at the onset of their careers or in the heart of their fame, but it’s a frustrating one to cling to as a narrative buoy. Not coincidentally, the only time Maria seems to be far from drowning is when she’s in the company of her eventual partner, Noor (Céleste Brunnquell), though that is a part that is as thankless as Maria’s joy is treated. Another film could have lent just a touch more focus to the fleeting instances of euphoria shared between lovers, a sometimes necessary reprieve from perpetual agony. Then again, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bike.
