PalCinema Review: Being Maria
A film attempts to depict what happened to actress Maria Schneider after appearing with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.
April 3, 2025
FILM: BEING MARIA
DIRECTED BY: JESSICA PALUD
STARRING: ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI, MATT DILLON, GIUSEPPE MAGGIO
RATING: 2 ½ out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
Imagine the scenario. It is 1973. Marlon Brando has just won (and refused) an Oscar for The Godfather. Famed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has cast him and a young actress named Maria Schneider in the film Last Tango in Paris. The film is so controversial that when released it receives an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.) Yet the film becomes the 7th highest grossing film of the year. Brando gets another Oscar nomination. What about Schneider? That is the context surrounding Being Maria, a new film from Jessica Palud. What happened on the film set? What became of Schneider?
There’s no doubt making a film like Last Tango in Paris would cause major cancellations today versus the commercial and critical success it received back in the 1970s. How Schneider was treated on the set is sad and legendary. If you’ve not seen the earlier film, Brando plays a 45-year-old man who has a fling with a 19-year-old woman, played by Schneider. The two have an intense and sexually violent relationship. The most famous scene features Brando on top of her from behind, essentially raping her. In Palud’s film, this is treated as a major turning point for Schneider whose life from then on is filled with erratic behavior, heroin addiction, and at least one abusive lesbian relationship.
Palud attempts to give us a brief introduction to Schneider’s life before the 1973 movie, showing her first as a high school student with an angry mother and an absent father whom she meets for the first time. It seems that Palud is trying to make some connection between Brando and Schneider’s biological father. Was her willingness to appear nude in several scenes with Brando part of a need for some fatherly love? What about that rape scene? Was Bertolucci or Brando to blame for its intensity? Besides these questions, what’s missing here are the immediate after effects of her involvement with the film. What was her psychological state when it wrapped?
This is a basic problem with the script of Being Maria. It attempts to tell Schneider’s story over an unclear number of years without any fine details. We don’t know if she trained as an actress or how she matured so quickly. The film relies mostly on surface events. It’s also not clear how she kept getting film roles after repeated hospitalizations for her drug abuse later in life.
The film doesn’t necessarily blame Marlon Brando either. The two actors seem to have a pretty positive rapport on set until that fateful scene. He is played by Matt Dillon who is also not given much depth, other than what we might already know about Brando, to work with. He comes across as rather stone faced as Brando, lacking some of the earlier actor’s notable on and off screen personality traits. I don’t blame Dillon for this because the script and direction are mostly focused on Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider. The actress clearly plays her as pained and traumatized but the script doesn’t dig far enough into her inner struggle or how the episodes in her life specifically connect to each other.
What is of interest about the film is how a couple of key Parisian locations were used from Last Tango in Paris to recreate some of its scenes. Similarly, the production design of the apartment where said rape scene occurred closely resembles the set from the earlier film.
Being Maria does provide a depiction of the effects of filmmaking in an era when pushing sexual boundaries was an artful fad. There wasn’t any such thing as an “intimacy coordinator” for actors as there is today on film sets when actors are engaged in physically intimate scenes. But it could have gone deeper into what happened to Schneider in the close aftermath of the film as well as offer us more sympathy for the actress. Simply showing how she acted out in the years that followed isn’t enough.
Being Maria is now in very limited theatrical release.
Have you seen the 1973? What are your thoughts about it?
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I was really impressed by Vartolomei’s brief supporting role in MICKEY 17. That, and casting Dillon as Marlon Brando is just genius. I still want to see this just to see how the screenplay works, but I’m cautiously optimistic based on your review.