Since its premiere, Bernardo Bertolucci's film knew how to be one of the most controversial in the history of cinema. María Schneider said she felt violated and outraged during a scene that was out of the script. The director's discharge and the fight between Piazzolla and Gato Barbieri over the soundtrack.
The butter scene, the subsequent allegations of R-, Brando's intense performance, the fall of Maria Schneider, and the censorship. Last Tango in Paris, by Bernardo Bertolucci, was released fifty years ago in theaters in the United States. From that moment it became one of the films that generated the greatest controversy in the history of cinema.
Everything was born with a street scene and a S- fantasy. Bernardo Bertolucci was walking distractedly down a Paris street, perhaps thinking about the structure of a scene or a frame, when he saw a beautiful young woman pass by. They glanced at each other briefly. He, perhaps, followed her a few blocks. But nothing happened between them, they didn't even speak. The director imagined what a S- encounter with this stranger would be like, of whom he knew nothing, not even the name, only that she was beautiful, attractive and that she was much younger than him: "I don't want to know your name, you don't have a name, me neither; without names. We are going to forget about the world, about what we do, we are going to forget about everything. Because everything that is out there is shit”, says the character of Marlon Brando. That was the starting point of one of the most controversial films of the last half-century.
Bertolucci had just succeeded with The Conformist, based on a text by Alberto Moravia. He had a free hand for any project he proposed. He sold tickets and managed to build a reputation as an author. Last Tango in Paris was born as a story about a purely S- relationship and was transformed into a film about loneliness and alienation. A widower around 45 who is still mourning the suicide of his wife meets a twenty-year-old Parisian girl, they know nothing about the other, it is an anonymous, almost desperate relationship.
An old Hollywood glory, not so old -Brando was 48 years old- but worn. No one believed anymore that Marlon Brando had much more to offer. But with The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris, he proved to still be the greatest living actor. His partner was a young girl, with a personality, 19 beautiful years old and self-confident. The image of Maria Schneider only wearing jeans and her breasts exposed or talking to Brando with her abundant exposed pubic hair disturbed several generations.
The premiere was at the New York Film Festival. It produced a huge commotion. Criticism was sharply divided. Pauline Kael, the influential New Yorker critic, wrote that it was an event similar to the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a watershed, a historic moment for cinema.
The comments, and the attempts at censorship, only increased public interest. For the premiere, tickets came to be worth $100. In the first weeks of the exhibition, it was normal to see lines of several blocks on the streets of New York or Paris, which began sometime before the previous performance, to see it. Three hours on the street to manage to occupy a seat.
Maria Schneider once said that the story was originally intended as a homoS- relationship. Ingmar Bergman agreed with her: he said that it was only understood if it was a story. Some researchers claim that the idea of the story featuring a gay man was abandoned when Jean-Louis Trintignant scrapped the role.
Tringtinant and Dominique Sanda had starred in Bertolucci's previous project, The Conformist. Sanda was pregnant and decided not to participate.
Belmondo and Warren Beatty also did not accept the role. Alain Delon was the next to receive the proposal. But they did not agree. The Frenchman also wanted to be a producer.
Many actresses were considered for the role. One of them was Sylvia Kristel who achieved fame a couple of years later playing Emmanuelle, a classic adult film. Catherine Deneuve was another who almost got the role.
Bertolucci gave Brando almost metaphysical explanations about his character. The actor didn't even bother to listen to him, to understand him. Much of his speech was improvised and used fragments of his life. In those years he no longer made too much effort to memorize his lines. The set was flooded with cards with the lines that he was sowing to save himself from studying. And that Bertolucci would take care that they did not see each other on the plane. He even went so far as to ask that they write part of his speech on the naked body of María Schneider.
For decades the butter scene was the center of discussions, attention, and fantasies for several generations. The reference to butter and S- got into everyday speech. In 2006, María Schneider said that she found out very shortly before the cry for action that this scene was going to exist. She claimed that she was not in the script. She clarified that Brando did not sodomize her but that she still felt outraged and violated. That the tears were real because of the psychological violence to which she was being subjected without warning. She said that scene ruined her career, that she was too young, and that she should have stopped filming and asked her agent or lawyer to help her deny the violence that the superstar was subjecting her to and the consecrated director.
A few years later, shortly before her early death (she was 58) from lung cancer in 2011, she reaffirmed that she felt "cheated, humiliated and violated" on set.
Bertolucci a couple of years after she denied it. He claimed that the scene was in the original script. He and Brando, that morning, over breakfast, were discussing how to film it. The actor was buttering toast. He looked at the director and they both understood and decided to incorporate the butter into the scene. Bertolucci said that what was surprising to Schneider, that she was not aware of, was the inclusion of shortening. She didn't know. She wanted her to be surprised, for her not to act out the humiliation, but to feel it. When he explained all this, with the two protagonists already dead, Bertolucci said that he felt guilty but not sorry.
The Italian did not trust Maria's acting skills. He believed that she was too young and that her 19 years were not going to allow her to carry out the situation. That's why, he said, he incorporated the surprise factor.
It was a habitual practice of certain directors, especially prestigious ones: the film had to come before everything. The interpreters had to submit to him and his decisions. Especially if they were women. “It gives me tenderness and even grace that there are people so naive who believe that what they see in the cinema happens in reality. They don't know that in the movies S- is almost always fiction and they probably believe that every time John Wayne shoots his enemy, he really falls dead, ”Bertolucci said sarcastically when questioned. However, he intended Brando and Maria to have real S-, not pretend. The interpreters refused.
The story of that scene has absorbed the narrative of the film for the last fifteen years. When Maria Schneider denounced the situation, nobody paid much attention to her. She was a headline in some media, but immediately, she covered another topic. On the one hand, no one was too surprised: they were stories that were heard frequently, it was assumed that this is how the industry worked. On the other hand, María had had a difficult life, a truncated career that had never fully exploited its potential (despite her excellent appearance in Antonioni's El Pasajero in 1975), with S- confessions, drug problems, and psychiatric hospitalizations. and that meant that they did not take her seriously and that her words were not valued. On the promotional tour, Maria herself said that she was S-, that she had had relationships with at least 50 men and 70 women, and that she had tried cocaine and heroin. Some of her believed that she allowed Bertolucci to do whatever he wanted with her without respecting her rights.
With the change of era, it was enough for a Spanish site to make a video with the story and the statements of María Schneider for the story to go viral and for the indignation to spread at the speed of light. Many actors and actresses came out to talk about it. Chris Evans, Captain America, was one of the most emphatic. He tweeted that he would never see a Bertolucci movie again in his life. However, at this stage, there was also a misrepresentation. Maria Schneider always clarified that she had not been physically R- by Brando on set and that the act had been simulated. That didn't matter to the media headlines that claimed there had been R-.
She kept in touch with Brando. But neither of them spoke to Bertolucci ever again. Despite this, in his memoirs, the actor wrote that Bertolucci, along with Gillo Pontecorvo and Elia Kazan, was one of the three best directors he had worked with.
In his memoirs, Brando says that there are no frontal N- of him because it was very cold on set and therefore his member shrank to an embarrassing size. That he tried, but he couldn't. Bertolucci, years later, declared that in one scene Brando's penis was visible but that he left it on the cutting room floor because he considered Brando, his character, an extension of himself, and that showing Brando naked was like showing himself. without clothes to himself.
The film faced censorship in many countries. In Francoist Spain, there were several who crossed the border to see it in a French cinema. N- and scenes shocked the censors. In Italy, it could not be exhibited for long either. Bertolucci was prosecuted and lost his civil rights for a few years.
In Argentina, it was released almost a year after the premiere. It was at the end of 1973, a few days before the assumption of Juan Domingo Perón in his third term. The premiere was kind of weird. It did not have the expected dimension, by the enormous expectation that it had generated. It was in a single room and in a cinema that used to show films that had been on the bill for weeks, to which latecomers flocked. It was not one of the main ones, it was neither on Corrientes Avenue nor in Lavalle. It was at Cinema One on Suipacha Street. Despite being left out of the centrality of the circuit and the fact that the first days of a democratic government were lived, Last Tango in Paris did not last two weeks on the bill. And that wasn't because it flopped at the box office. After a complaint from an individual, a prosecutor seized the copy, and the film became censored. A few months later, with the arrival of Miguel Paulino Tato at the Cinematographic Qualification Entity in August 1974, film cuts and prohibitions became common: Argentine viewers got used to seeing Frankenstein films or, directly, not seeing them. The Last Tango in Paris and A Clockwork Orange were the two most paradigmatic cases and the ones that fed the most fantasies. The Argentine public had to wait more than a decade, until the democratic reopening with Alfonsín, to see the old Bertolucci in theaters.
The music from the film was also very well known. He definitively consecrated Gato Barbieri, the Argentine saxophonist living in the United States, who with his jazz fusion had found a place among the greats and had made Latin American music known. Gato, after leaving Argentina, had worked for several years in Italy. There he composed and played for Pasolini, Francesco Rossi, and also for Bertolucci. Michele, Gato's partner, had been Bertolucci's assistant director.
When the Italian director, Barbieri accepted the challenge without realizing what it would mean for his career to compose the film's soundtrack. The work was not without controversy. Barbieri proposed Astor Piazzolla as an arranger. But the bandoneon player took the offer badly. Barbieri was going to see him play in Buenos Aires nightclubs in the early sixties, now he was proposing to be a kind of assistant (very qualified of his). Piazzolla's ego couldn't take it. He asked for a $15,000 fee, a huge figure for the time, as a way to make sure he didn't get the job. The hired one was Oliver Nelson. After the success of the film, the controversies, the million-dollar sales of Gato Barbieri's album (which is not strictly a soundtrack), and his consequent worldwide fame, Piazzolla got angry and went out to show his displeasure to the media, without hiding his hatred. just like I used to do. He belittled Barbieri's work, spoke of millionaire figures that he would be pocketing, and told a different version: he said that Bertolucci offered him to do the main theme of the film but that he did not do it because he was preparing his show at the Colón. Barbieri denied it. They crossed dart for weeks in the Argentine media. Even Bertolucci appeared on local radio, as Sergio Pujol tells in his magnificent and recent biography of Gato Barbieri.
The last tango in Paris celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It continues to raise controversy. For some a masterpiece, for others an empty film, the height of the pretentious. One of the last greats, Brando, the intensity and beauty of Maria Schneider, the homage to Bacon, Storaro's photography, Gato Barbieri's sax, Bertolucci's ideas and, of course, Paris, were immortalized there.
