feminish

Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando’s 19-year-old sex companion/sex object in Last Tango in Paris (1972), gave an interview with the Daily Telegraph recently.

“The humiliation was very strong. Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48. And he was Marlon Brando!”

The infamous scene in which Brando sodomises her character with the help of some butter was not in the original script. “Marlon had the idea. When they told me, I had a burst of anger. Woo! I threw everything. And nobody can force someone to do something not in the script. But I didn’t know that. I was too young. So I did the scene and I cried. I cried real tears during that scene. I was feeling humiliation.”

Her words have really stuck in my mind. It matters to me that she suffered in making the film; and that the butter scene was genuinely horrible for her. I watched Last Tango in Paris on the telly two years ago. I was alone, and the film seized all my attention - I felt consumed by it, and confused; confused because it was overwhelming and it was sexy and I was outraged by it. I knew that it was an important film and I wanted to experience it. But I remember explicitly shaking-myself out of its compelling grip in the butter scene - it was taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go. This is just acting, I had to tell myself, You can step back and see that. You can disagree, you can object, but you don’t need to upset yourself with your own outrage - just watch and be aware.

But having read this interview I’m sad for Maria Schneider and I’m even sad for Brando (though can he really have meant he felt raped and manipulated?). And I’m sad you can’t put a bright red sticker on the plastic front of every DVD case, or have a BBC Queen’s English voice before it’s ever shown on TV, announcing: During the making of this film, the actor and actress felt they were raped, humiliated and manipulated. We’d like to remind viewers that that is what you see, what you experience, what you participate in when you view the film.

My heart was lightened when I found feminist film theorist E. Ann Kaplan’s 1974 review. We can’t possibly take the butter scene seriously, she insists - it’s ridiculous, comic. Bertolucci has made a failure of a film, she maintains, not because of silly butter but because so long as Jeanne [Schreiner] is just a sex object and does not take a central role, the film cannot work, even on its own terms.

Bertolucci could have explored the drastic changes that have taken place in sexual relations in films over the past twenty years. Jeanne and Paul [Brando] are both getting something out of returning to clearly defined roles that our era has called in question. Both postwar U.S. and New Wave ideas about sex are ultimately shown to be inadequate. Jeanne and Paul do not manage to create a new place, free from their unsatisfactory lives. Paul uses Jeanne to act out a hostility that he brings with him from his painful world. He cannot let go of his suffering, be free with her, receive from her. His pain rather sours their world, making it harsh and ugly.

[…] Only through Jeanne’s consciousness could we come to see how Paul is holding on to an outdated macho concept in a world where women no longer willingly play a submissive role.
[…] The ending of the film [Jeanne’s murder of Paul] resolves nothing and seems contrived because Jeanne has been inadequately developed. Had we really known her motivations, we would have had the key to the main ideas in the film.