When Film Forum showed “Last Tango in Paris” this past December, as part of a Marlon Brando retrospective, the venue’s web page for the screening included a note stating that “lead actress Maria Schneider revealed in 2007 that a sexually humiliating scene was conceived off-script by director Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando together, without informing her in advance,” and encouraging viewers to inform themselves about the controversy, the stars, and the director.
Yet, when the same theatre showed the film as recently as 2015, there was no such note, even though Schneider, who died in 2011, at the age of fifty-eight, had spoken publicly about what she suffered years before. What changed? Her ordeal became a cause célèbre, thanks to a remarkable memoir, “Tu T’Appelais Maria Schneider,” by one of her cousins, the French journalist and novelist Vanessa Schneider.
Published in France in 2018, the book gained wider acclaim here when it came out in English, in 2023, with the title “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” in a translation by Molly Ringwald. (A pre-publication excerpt ran in ‘The New Yorker’.) Vanessa Schneider’s trenchant account not only deals with the notorious scene in question — which depicts anal rape — but also details much other mistreatment that her cousin endured on the set, and bears witness to aftereffects that she endured for the rest of her life.
With the book’s publication, the abuse of Maria Schneider by Bertolucci and Brando was no longer just a footnote in an obituary or an outrage among the cognoscenti; it finally assumed its rightful place as the story of the film itself.
