In this day and age of IP-driven slopbusters, any film that dares to respond to a pre-existing intellectual property is worthy. Responding requires the filmmaker, at the very least, to push beyond slavish reverence; in other words, to not simply serve up digitally refurbished content that spends the best part of three hours dangling diabetes-inducing nostalgia candies to an audience conditioned to demand just that. Disney, with its conveyor belt of live-action remakes of its animated catalog, is, unsurprisingly, the biggest supplier of that. But, so too, is a critical and awards darling like Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, a film that aspires to be something more than F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original, but is also so in awe of it that it forgets to be noteworthy at all.
Compared to that, Jessica Palud’s Being Maria — positioned as a feminist response to Bernardo Bertolucci’s toxically male Last Tango in Paris, released in 1972 — is an undisputed triumph. Palud and co-screenwriter Laurette Polmanss have “freely adapted” Vanessa Schneider’s memoir My Cousin Maria Schneider (2018) to capture fragments of actress Maria Schneider’s turbulent life before and after she starred in Bertolucci’s highly controversial anti-love story. But the central focus — and, really, the only significant merit — of Being Maria is its fierce rejection of everything Bertolucci’s film (and filmmaking) stands for.
Most obviously, Palud demonstrates this by making her film about Maria (Anamaria Vartolomei) the person rather than Jeanne, her character in Last Tango. Gone almost immediately, then, is the Bertolucci film’s emotional opacity — which was captured most resplendently by Vittorio Storaro’s expressive camerawork that emphasized the characters’ (emotional) confusion by turning them into a smorgasbord of smudged and smeared faces hiding behind translucent glass paneling. Everything in Being Maria, on the other hand, is crystal clear. Sébastien Buchmann’s camerawork doesn’t impose anything upon Vartolomei here; it only captures her baby face perpetually plastered with a deer-in-the-headlights-like expression. Palud sticks to this muted shooting approach even when Maria is on the Last Tango set; her restraint, in a way, is a resilient response to the bombastic “brilliance” of both Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) and his leading man, Marlon Brando (Matt Dillon).
Nowhere is this more effectively evident than in the scene that details the making of Last Tango’s most controversial scene involving Brando’s character anally raping Maria’s character using butter as a lubricant. Its production history — the scene was conceptualized by Brando and Bertolucci impromptu without Maria Schneider’s consultation, in order to get an “authentic” reaction out of her — remains as abrasively distasteful as its unannounced appearance in Last Tango. But in Being Maria, Palud undermines the “brilliance” of said abrasiveness: rather than simply recreating the cruelty of the act itself, the director intercuts close-ups of Maria’s very real tears and screams with chillingly passive reaction shots of the film crew shooting it all. It’s far and away the film’s most effective moment; arguably, the only time it successfully restores Schneider’s lost dignity by brutally exposing the casual male cruelty (masquerading as artistic genius) that stole it.
Any scene that comes before or after that feels grossly underdeveloped. Palud’s restraint and realism are impressive as a repudiation of Bertolucci’s jagged expressionism, but they also need to work beyond that mere counterbalance. There’s awfully little in Being Maria that distinguishes Maria from other films about actresses who get chewed up and spit out by men in the industry. She mentions events that seem deeply personal — the drastically different work experience she had with Michelangelo Antonioni in The Passenger (1975) than Bertolucci in Last Tango, and the film also touches upon critical phases of her life after that experience — her becoming a junkie, then finding a soulmate who cured her in Noor (Céleste Brunnquell). But Palud never delves into any of this, fearing, perhaps, that doing so would reveal contradictory sides to her personality that would somehow weaken her film’s critique of Bertolucci and Brando’s treatment of her. Whatever the motivation, by evading character complexity, Being Maria never even dares to become Maria Schneider. It only really comes across as the anti-Last Tango in Paris, this while also sharing one of that film’s (many) fatal flaws: undermining the person — Maria Schneider.
DIRECTOR: Jessica Palud; CAST: Anamaria Vartolomei, Céleste Brunnquell, Giuseppe Maggio, Yvan Attal, Matt Dillon; DISTRIBUTOR: Kino Lorber; IN THEATERS: March 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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