Some films unsettle you without warning. And some others you go into, knowing full well that you will be unsettled. But nothing prepares us for the intense horror of watching a young woman being defiled on camera while shooting for a film that she hoped would put her on the world map.
After Bernando Bertolucci’s 1972 Last Tango In Paris, Maria Schneider did become world famous, but for all the wrong reasons. During that fateful scene in which she was kept in the dark about the degree of ‘intimacy’ that was being aimed for, she underwent rape at the hands of the leading man, Marlon Brando, with the director in the know, and the crew looking on.
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In all the reports that came out after The Last Tango In Paris — the uproar never really died down — it was clear that the actress was given no heads-up: whether it was Brando’s idea and Bertolucci went along, because he couldn’t say no to the big Hollywood star, or it was something that they dreamt up together, all accounts confirmed that Schneider was completely unaware of what the scene would entail.
Working from a book written by Maria’s cousin Vanessa Schneider, director Jessica Palud’s Cannes entry Being Maria’ is not so much a standard-procedure biopic which tracks a life from beginning to end in a linear fashion, but a deliberate focus on the before-during-after of the film which would change Schneider’s life, very much for the worse.
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Anamaria Vartolomai is spot on as the very young, very inexperienced Schneider. As someone who has grown up with an absentee father, Schneider should have been a hardy creature. But from what we see in the film, she is fragile, willing to please: ‘I can see something wounded in you’, says an older man, while observing her closely. She goes along with the director’s ‘vision’, which results in her being ‘naked in almost every shot, even when I am cooking pasta’ ( in her own words).
After that terrifying scene, we see Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) coming to Schneider’s room where she is sobbing, heartbroken. He is unapologetic about how things panned out: he didn’t want to tell her anything, he says, because then her reaction wouldn’t have been ‘natural’. Matt Dillion plays Brando with conviction, puffed up with the kind of brio that the older star was notorious for: he is very clearly the star of the show, and what he wants, he gets.
The aftermath gives us the unravelling of Maria: so impacted is she by the kind of negative publicity she gets post-release, she starts to behave recklessly. She hooks up with a heroin addict and begins shooting up herself. She flubs her lines in the films that she does manage to get. A relationship with a reporter becomes the anchor around which she wraps herself, and we see her slowly come out of a very dark place.
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This second act doesn’t have the strength of the first half, but still, Being Maria is an important addition to the films that speak up for women in the movies and can fuel up the on-again-off-again conversation around #MeToo, and the treatment of women on set, and off it.
How youth and beauty become entwined around the dance of celebrity worship is the theme of Coralie Fargeat’s body horror movie, The Substance. Demi Moore plays the older woman, who after a successful Hollywood stint, has had to resort to doing the kind of dead-beat TV show in which women in skin-tight leotards prance about in the name of exercise; Dennis Quaid is the studio boss who decides that the network needs a younger face; and Margaret Qualley plays a ‘better version’ of Moore.
A mysterious substance is the elixir which leads to Moore’s younger, smoother self. But you can’t play with the natural order without any pushbacks. And that is really what, beneath all the blood and gore and the pustules and the bald patches we are treated to with full gusto, we are left with.
Both Moore and Qualley play nicely off each other, and Quaid’s odious producer would be a great candidate for the growing #MeToo list. Up until now, The Substance has received the longest-standing ovation at Cannes. Thirteen minutes. Yes, these things are counted.
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