There will ultimately be no screening of the film The Last Tango in Paris (1972), by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018), this Sunday, December 15 at the Cinémathèque française, in Paris, planned as part of a retrospective devoted to the American actor Marlon Brando (1924-2004). The lack of mediation around the film, which shows a rape scene, filmed without the consent of actress Maria Schneider (1952-2011), had provoked protests all week from cinema personalities and feminist associations.
“In the interest of calming minds, and in view of the security risks involved, the Cinémathèque française is canceling the screening scheduled for this Sunday, at 8 p.m.wrote the establishment, in a press release published Saturday evening. The safety of our audiences and our staff comes before all other considerations”. A cancellation which follows that, in 2017 after an outcry from feminist associations, of the retrospective dedicated to Jean-Claude Brisseau (1944-2019), convicted in 2005 for sexual harassment.
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The actress Maria Schneider was nineteen years old when the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci imposed on her a scene of (simulated) sodomy with the star Marlon Brando, aged forty-eight. “Even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and, to be honest, a little violated, by both Marlon and Bertolucci.”the actress told the British newspaper in 2007 Daily Mail about this now famous scene, during which Marlon Brando uses butter as lubricant.
Broken trajectory
Actress Jessica Chastain brought the sequence back to light in 2017, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, before journalist Vanessa Schneider, cousin of the actress and senior reporter at Mondedoes not retrace the broken trajectory of the actress in the story Your name was Maria Schneider (Grasset, 2018), adapted for cinema in the film Maria (2024).
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