Sometimes an expression takes shape. In the cinema, we say “to be on all levels”. In Maria, by Jessica Palud, no more than three seconds go by without Anamaria Vartolomei on screen. This is not an exaggeration and it is good news. In the film, presented last May at Cannes (in theaters on June 19), the 25-year-old actress plays Maria Schneider, who preceded her in this particular profession and paid the price. Through it, we witness a sort of before/during/after Last Tango in Paris. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s film, judged upon its release in 1972 as “pornography”, the main actress had in turn become the pure and simple symbol of “slut”. She won’t recover.
It is this destiny full of cracks, undermined by an industry and an era, that the director wanted to tell. For the casting, she met more than 200 young women. Unknowns, carbon copies of Maria, who do not go beyond the tests. More seasoned profiles, less similar, but that’s not it yet. And then: Anamaria Vartolomei. We are just before summer 2022. The actress has already received the César for Most Promising Actress for The Event by Audrey Diwan. She only discovered the existence of Maria Schneider two years earlier, during a role in Jellyfish, where director Sophie Lévy often took it as a reference. The young actress paid no more attention than that. When she read the script, she became passionate about her story. “I was very angry with myself because all I knew about her was Tango » she recognizes today.
Fair balance between what we know about history and a modest redefinition
Anamaria Vartolomei (ensemble Chanel).
BOBY
When she meets Vanessa Schneider – the author of the book behind the Jessica Palud film (Your name was Maria Schneider, published by Grasset) and cousin of Maria – the actress asks her a thousand questions. Six months later, when they meet again by chance at a party, the first does not recognize the second. The young woman standing in front of her upsets her but she doesn’t know why. “I’m Anamaria,” she blurted out. “In fact, she was in Maria,” recalls the writer. Little leather jacket, buckles, 501 jeans, fists in her pockets… Well before the shoot, she had adopted everything from her model. And not just a look. The gestures, the speech, the walk… Even before filming, the actress and the director prepare the role for several weeks, see each other every day, concentrate on each scene. “I’ve never done theater but I really had the impression that that’s what we were doing,” explains Anamaria Vartolomei.
The result is there: the young actress goes through fifteen years of Maria Schneider’s life with ease, from the modesty and shyness of adolescence driven by an inner fire to the dark side, dominated by drugs, shame and darkness. On screen, his angelic face, feline and hypersensitive at the same time, displays contained violence. Screaming in the middle of the night or replaying scenes from Last Tango, it carries us away. What can we say about the simulated sodomy scene and its all-too-famous plate of butter? To prepare for this moment that movie fans around the world know and which would be at the heart of the film, she documented herself, going so far as to unearth the original script in the National Archives. Even if it means facing a monument, you might as well do it seriously.
For this “film within a film”, we witness a fair balance between what we know about history and a modest redefinition. On the big day, the filming took place in the presence of an intimacy coordinator. “I had internalized the violence so much that I cried all day,” confides the actress. By the end of the scene, Matt Dillon – who plays Marlon Brando – was exhausted and the crew was exhausted. “We had just understood what had happened on the film fifty years earlier,” explains Jessica Palud. Those minutes had hovered from the start like a shadow over Maria. From the director to the producer, including the author, the co-writer and the main actress, a whole chorus of women got involved in the film. “We all tried to give him back the voice that had been taken from him. If the speech hits the target that it missed at the time, then we will have succeeded,” Anamaria Vartolomei recently declared. This Maria will, we are convinced, have a certain resonance.
Mariaby Jessica Palud (in theaters June 19)
Your name was Maria Schneiderby Vanessa Schneider (Grasset, 2018)
