BEING MARIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Being Maria, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 20, 2025

There's plenty to critique about the treatment and perception of Maria Schneider, whose quick rise to fame unfortunately pigeonholed her in the eyes of audiences and the minds of filmmakers. There's also a lot to celebrate about Schneider's determination to evade that sort of prejudice about her and to speak out against the undermining of women in film. Being Maria, which may have its heart in the right place, doesn't do either of those things convincingly.

Indeed, co-writer/director Jessica Palud's movie seems to go out of its way to portray its version of Schneier, played by Anamaria Vartolomei, as a victim first and someone with little agency foremost. This Maria is essentially whittled down to operating purely on having been traumatized while shooting the film that essentially made her career. Beyond the fact that Palud's depiction of what happened on that set is wholly questionable, presenting it as basically the defining feature of the actress' life, career, and assorted struggles reduces her to almost a non-entity in her own story.

The film in question, of course, is Last Tango in Paris, which garnered a notorious reputation even before it was released—one that, arguably, has given people the wrong impression of it and influenced how some assume what must have happened during shooting. In this movie, Maria is a relatively unknown actor, playing some bit parts in productions in her native France.

We're first introduced to her difficult home life, though, with a mercurial mother (played by Marie Gillain) who come across as jealous of her daughter's mere existence. Some of that comes down to 16-year-old Maria's recent interest in connecting with her father (played by Yvan Attal), a famous actor who brings her on sets and along with him to meals with other stars. The mother soon kicks her daughter out of the house. While a few years pass and Maria acts in a few movies, the editing here is a bit sneaky in how it insinuates that Maria is younger than she actually would have been when Bernardo Bertolucci, played here by Giuseppe Maggio, cast her in the co-lead role of his controversial 1972 film.

Palud and Laurette Polmanss' screenplay, "freely adapted" from a memoir by the subject's cousin Vanessa Schneider, provides some scenes of Maria filming with Bertolucci and co-star Marlon Brando (Matt Dillon). The turning point is the infamous "butter scene," in which Brando's character rapes Schneider's—a scripted part of the story, complicated by the last-minute inclusion of a stick of butter as a prop.

Palud fudges and even goes beyond every account, including Schneider's own, to portray Maria's co-star as committing a sexual assault on her—in more graphic detail, by the way, than anything that's actually in the film this movie is attempting to re-create. If the real Brando weren't dead, he might have had grounds for a defamation suit against the makers of this movie.

Did the real Bertolucci go too far in trying to get a certain reaction from Schneider? Based on her account and his own, the director likely did, but this movie raises no real questions about the specifics of that situation. It simply attempts to shock with an inherent mischaracterization of the shooting of that scene, in order to explain Maria's quick decline for the rest of the story (For a movie that's about the mistreatment of women in movie productions, that particular moment feels a bit hypocritical, too).

That second section is less inflammatory, obviously, but it's also not particularly compelling. Most of that comes down to how uncertain the screenplay is about Maria. She's meant to be an advocate for herself, her reputation, and her career, speaking up about her treatment on Bertolucci's film—only to be told to stay quiet and do publicity by various men of power—and staying away from any more on-screen nudity, lest anyone else attempt to take advantage of her and force her into a kind of typecasting that could be difficult to escape. Mostly, though, the screenplay focuses on the mess of her personal life, which becomes one of financial instability and heavy drug use.

There's an imbalance in these two aspects of the character, with the filmmakers leaning more toward the tragic side of Maria's life than her role as an advocate. To really delve into that second element, the screenplay has to introduce another character, a college student named Noor (Céleste Brunnquell) who's writing a dissertation on women in the movie industry and becomes Maria's lover (as well as, for some reason, the target of a scene of domestic abuse on the actress' part). It feels disingenuous that the filmmakers don't trust their lead character to be what they want her to be without so much external pressure and pushing.

To be sure, Being Maria makes a good case that Schneider's story should be told, especially as a counter to how dominated by men the movies and moviemaking of this era were. It makes a better case, though, that this story should be told with more honesty, nuance, and actual recognition of its main character's personal and professional accomplishments.

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