Being Maria
Directed by Jessica Palud
Written by Jessica Palud and Laurette Polmanss
Starring Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour and 42 minutes
Limited release March 21 in NYC at the Quad and March 28 in LA at the Nuart

by Andrea Schmidt, Staff Writer

At about the half-way point of the new Maria Schneider biopic, Being Maria, Scheider (Anamaria Vartolomei) talks about how two men on the street approached her by saying, “Get the butter.” “That’s my fan club,” she says, a constant derisive reminder of the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci. A little over a year ago, a NYC cinema hosted a screening of Last Tango in Paris (1972). Brando and Bertolucci are both long dead and can’t benefit directly from the praise or financial compensation, so I admittedly don’t have as much hesitation about screening the film itself. Yet, the social media post for the film screening and its comments were filled with “Go get the butter” and pats of butter emojis, all encouraged by the cinema team. Even if they had been living under a rock for the past ten years and didn’t know that this scene had been a non-simulated sexual assault (which Schneider had talked about throughout her career), here was the memeification of and delight in a rape scene. The memeification of sexual assault and harrassment, of course, is nothing new. From the Young Turks to washed up boy band stars to even Duolingo, the mockery of sexual assault victims, such as Amber Heard, takes up a substantial space across on(and off)line political spectrums. Middle and high school girls experience this abuse on a daily basis, and even a billionaire cannot escape the alleged harassment of a “non-toxic masculinity” grifter.

Being Maria chronicles approximately the first fifteen years of Schneider’s experience in the film industry. As a teenager, she attempts to connect with her absentee father, a well-known French actor. In turn, her mercurial mother rejects her. Schneider anticipates an acting breakthrough at age 19 when Bernardo Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio emitting creep) casts in his already controversial film Last Tango in Paris. Schneider finds herself increasingly at the mercy of the director and her co-star, Marlon Brando. The filming sequence culminates with the butter scene, a sexual assault, which Schneider throughout her career described as non-consensual. The film then chronicles her downspiral in the years following the release of the controversial film. Bertolucci and Brando, who have already once violated her, leave her to the misogynist public and press reaction towards the film.

The first part of Being Maria is extremely engaging, even though I found myself (as I am sure many will) dreading the reenactment of the butter scene. The performances in particular elevate this biopic and carry the film through its weaker second half. At that point, the film slows down considerably and seems to plod through a perfunctory biopic by the numbers plot (drug use, breakdown, comeback). While sometimes suffering from adherence to the generic conventions of the biopic, Being Maria still maintains interest throughout, cemented through its strong performances.

An agent at one point comments on Schneider’s striking gaze, and Vartolomei again draws on her determined otherworldly gaze. Vartolomei’s performance was the anchoring point for Audrey Diwan’s 2021 adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s abortion memoir The Happening. The actress draws on this thousand yard stare, again, to embody a woman nearly destroyed by misogyny. As illustrated in the United States at the moment with an administration full of rapists and the strong likelihood of national abortion ban in the near future, anti-abortion and rape-culture are wholely interconnected. The intertextuality of Vartolomei’s two performances speaks to the resistance to the overwhelming nefariousness of the patriarchy.

One thing the film illustrates particularly well is that victims can also have positive memories associated with their assailants. Rape culture and sexual assault apologists unfortunately then often dictate that these associations makes the severity of the assault less real and somehow absolve the assailant. Dillon’s Brando functions as a sort of father figure on-set times, giving Schneider advice on acting and praising her in-between takes. Small moments of boundary pushing leading up to the assault indicate a lack of concern for Schneider’s well-being by both Brando and Bertolucci. Brando pushes her head under water in the bathtub at one point without permission. Afterwards, instead of apologizing to Schneider, he asks Bertolucci if “it’s ok.” This was not the first time Brando had assaulted a co-star in the name of improvised acting. During auditions for On the Waterfront (1954), Brando (this time in kahoots with director Elia Kazan) flipped up Eva-Marie Saint’s skirt without consent, causing her to cry. As depicted in the Being Maria, Schneider openly talked about how she did not consent to the simulated sexual assault. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Tango cinematographer Vittorio Starraro continued to defend the scene, further illustrating that for many, including those posting butter emojis, sexual assault is not viewed as actual harm.

I would have liked the film to have incorporated the second half of Schneider’s life, where she advocated for female directors. In the current #metoo backlash, where the Academy Award was bestowed on a male director who convinced his very young female star that she did not need an on-set intimacy coordinator (for those maintaining that critique of this decision undermines Madison’s “agency”–have you ever set foot on a film set?!?), Being Maria provides a startling reminder of how little has changed.

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