The story behind the horrific shoot of ‘Last Tango in Paris’
The work of Bernardo Bertolucci is not easy to stomach, and the controversial director has had his films endlessly picked apart by critics and audiences alike. Whether it be The Dreamers or The Conformist, his films often explore extremely taboo relationships and sometimes twisted sexual dynamics, something that has sparked outrage and disgust over the years. The release of The Dreamers in 2003 is a perfect example of the tone within his work, following three teenagers who are left to live alone in Paris, forming a strange relationship between them and indulging in a number of sexual fantasies even though two of them are brother and sister.
The film received much backlash after its release, with its young stars being required to perform extremely physically demanding and disturbing scenes, with the plot revolving around incestuous relationships and sexual freedom. However, this is far from the tip of the iceberg, with Bertolucci being associated with far greater controversies from the production of his 1972 film, Last Tango in Paris.
Last Tango in Paris stars the legendary Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, who rose to fame after her dazzling performance in The Passenger and A Woman Like Eve. The film follows a recently widowed American who begins an affair with a young Parisian woman. While it sounds perfectly harmless, Bertolucci’s penchant for sadism, violence and misogyny tainted the shoot in a nasty atmosphere, with Schneider being treated horrifically by both Brando and Bertolucci and later speaking about the abuse she endured during its production.
The 1970s was not a good time for women in film, and Bertolucci consistently made films about his own sick sexual fantasies and attempted to pass them off as ‘experimental art’. That justification is not fooling anyone, and when watching the film, it becomes abundantly clear that this was not a purely creative pursuit.
The film contains a sodomy scene, something that was not included in the script and was added in after a suggestion made by Brando. At the time of the shoot, Schneider was just 19 years old while Brando was 48. Despite Schneider’s objections to filming a rape scene, it was added in, with the director saying that “the girl wasn’t mature enough to understand what was going on”, also saying that he didn’t tell her what was happening because, “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to react humiliated”.
During the scene, Brando’s character rapes Schneider’s character, using a stick of butter as lubricant. When reflecting on the ordeal of filming this scene, Scheider said, “I 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. Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
During a time in which intimacy coordinators were not used in the film industry, Schneider had no-one to advocate for her safety, leading her to be forced into filming an unsafe and incredibly disturbing scene. Due to the power dynamic between her and her co-star, her objections to this were completely ignored, with the actor only being told the day before that she would be filming this scene.
It casts the film in an entirely new light, and remains as a stark reminder as to the importance of intimacy coordinators on set and the previous filmmaking practices that left women in vulnerable and unsafe situations.
