Toward the end of Jessica Palud’s “Being Maria,” an uneven but poignantly restorative portrait of “Last Tango in Paris” star Maria Schneider (played here by “Happening” breakout Anamaria Vartolomei), the actress sits for an interview in which she reflects on her recent experience shooting Jacques Rivette’s self-disowned “Merry-Go-Round.”
With a warm smile on her face, Schneider describes the serendipity of the film’s premise, which revolves around a boy and a girl who cross paths in Paris after being summoned there by someone neither of them can find: “It’s about two people who meet because the person they were supposed to meet doesn’t show up.”
The production of Rivette’s creatively unmoored film was not a happy one (Schneider couldn’t stand the male lead, and quit the movie before it even wrapped), but you’d never know that from the way it’s discussed in “Being Maria.” So far as Palud is concerned, there’s more value — more truth — to be found in doomed and/or forgotten attempts at artistic discovery than there is in even the most iconic displays of artistic debasement.
It’s an ethos that “Being Maria” embodies in spite of itself, as Palud is much sharper in depicting Schneider’s trauma on the set of “Last Tango” than she is in detailing the psychic fallout of shooting Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama — particularly the butter-lubricated scene of anal rape, which was sprung on the actress and her character alike.
That’s also an ethos that “Being Maria” comes to assume as an identity. Palud’s spare and elliptical script (co-written with Laurette Polmanss, and based on a second-person memoir written by Schneider’s cousin Vanessa) is the furthest thing from the work of Jacques Rivette, and yet it too could be seen as a story about two people who meet because the person they were supposed to meet doesn’t show up.
One of those people is Maria Schneider, and the other is us. The person who never shows up is Jeanne, the character she played in Bertolucci’s film, and would always be remembered for — the one whose assault was captured on camera, and whose pain would follow the actress like a shadow for decades to come. Jeanne’s simulated but unscripted rape was meant to expose the truth of her character’s humiliation and distrust, but those emotions were manufactured at the expense of the 19-year-old girl who played her. They belonged to her, and “Being Maria” is determined to wrestle them back.
To that end, it’s helpful that Palud’s film — which starts three years before “Last Tango” was shot in 1972, and ends roughly decade later — frames Schneider’s encounter with Bertolucci as the defining episode of a life that extended far off-screen in both directions. The rape scene has an obvious gravity to it (it pulls Schneider up through her teenage years, and pins her down as she tries to leap into adulthood), but Palud refuses to privilege the most notorious episode of the actress’ life over the multitude of invisible moments that led to it or were created in its wake.
We meet Maria as a doe-eyed teen who’s been newly reacquainted with her actor dad (Yvan Attal as Daniel Gélin), a leading man who conceived her at the height of an affair with a 17-year-old model — and then, for the sake of his marriage refused to recognize her as his daughter. Their connection enrages Maria’s mother (“He’s like all men,” she seethes, “he fucks around and then he goes home to his wife”), but the misogyny baked into the film business only seems to make it more compelling for the young Maria, who’s eager for the male affection she never received as a child.
Palud doesn’t put too fine a point on that, but she doesn’t have to. “Actors don’t choose roles,” Maria is told, “roles choose actors,” and so it goes that she finds herself sitting across from a yassified Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio, playing the director as a pretentious young himbo), who looks at the fresh-faced girl sitting across from him and declares that “there’s something wounded about you.” It’s a wound that he’s eager to exploit. The next thing she knows, Maria is acting against the great Marlon Brando (Matt Dillon, in a nuanced performance that creates mystique without mimicry), and awing at his ability to make his character’s emotions seem real.
Locked into Maria’s perspective at all times, Palud shoots the making of “Last Tango” with a gauzy sense of remove — as though it were the most surreal experience imaginable, and also just work to be done. Just as there’s no dramatic build-up to Maria landing the part, there’s no romance to the process of acting it, nor the slightest whiff of self-satisfaction in recreating iconic scenes.
What we’re left with is a curious feeling of distance. Maria couldn’t be more enmeshed with her co-star on set, and yet she’s blithely left out of Brando’s impassioned conversations with their director; she is a prop for these men to use as they see fit, and it never occurs to them to ask for her thoughts on a given scene. So far as Bertolucci is concerned, his actors are merely an obstacle between their characters and the truth — a truth that he insists upon achieving by any means necessary (Bertolucci never comes off well, but nothing we see on screen is as damning as the fact that Palud was an intern on “The Dreamers,” and saw the director at work first-hand).
Even Brando feels uncomfortably vulnerable as the result of that approach, but he believes in a method that Maria is too young to question. He believes that yanking off the actress’ pants without warning and simulating an unscripted anal rape will allow Maria to express the “truth” of Jeanne’s horror, and he believes that the ends will justify the means (assuming he considers the ends at all). But what use is the truth of that moment if it doesn’t belong to Jeanne? And if the truth were created as a result of such extreme manipulation, would it not be the exact kind of artificial construction that Bertolucci was so determined to avoid?
There’s little ambiguity as to how “Being Maria” would answer those questions, but the indignities visited upon Maria speak for themselves, and Palud’s disinterest in judging the artistic quality of “Last Tango” is almost matched by her disinterest in limiting Schneider’s life to the stuff of a proto-#MeToo screed. On the contrary, she’s fascinated by the mottled self-image of a young woman who could feel herself being defined by the male gaze for all the world to see — a young woman whose star was born through an act of destruction, and whose public image would follow her into the most private spaces thereafter.
The particulars of that process are rendered in frustratingly generic fashion, as Maria’s effort to escape from the shadow of her success is reduced to a heroin addiction and a few bad days on set before a chance encounter with a young journalist (Céleeste Brunnquell) offers a new path forward. While the film observes that her public image would continue to be molded by a series of male directors, it fails to meaningfully explore how that tension manifested itself in Schneider’s post-“Tango” performances.
But even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.
“No one cares about truth,” a manager tells Maria after she’s a bit too honest on the “Last Tango” press tour, which is a performance unto itself. “Do your job as an actress, no more.” By inviting Vartolomei to play Schneider in a biopic so attuned to the difference between creation and destruction, “Being Maria” movingly reaffirms that Schneider was doing her job as an actress — right up until the moment when Bertolucci and Brando forced her to stop.
Grade: B
A Kino Lorber release, “Being Maria” is now playing in theaters.
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