It was a scene that scarred the life of a young actress and left a stain on the career of Bernardo Bertolucci, one of cinema’s most talented directors, who died Monday of cancer aged 77.
It was a scene that scarred the life of a young actress and left a stain on the career of Bernardo Bertolucci, one of cinema’s most talented directors, who died Monday of cancer aged 77.
Before #MeToo and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the notorious “butter scene” in Bertolucci’s 1972 film “Last Tango In Paris” had been seen as the nadir of the film industry’s treatment of women.
In it, the young French actress Maria Schneider, who was 19 at the time, is depicted as being anally raped by the middle-aged Marlon Brando on a Paris apartment floor with the aid of a lump of butter.
Its visceral sexual violence saw the film banned in several countries and sparked a screen myth that the scene was real.
French actress Maria Schneider was traumatised from what she went through in “Last Tango in Paris” when she was just 19
PIERRE ANDRIEU, AFP/File
But that did not stop the movie being hailed by critics as one of the best films of the 1970s, with the legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael saying it had “altered the face of an art form”, comparing it to Stravinsky’s masterpiece “The Rite of Spring”.
Many feminists, however, denounced it as an demeaning “tool of male dominance”.
While the sex was simulated, it later emerged that Schneider had been kept in the dark about what was to happen by Brando and Bertolucci, who were both later nominated for Oscars.
“I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script,” she said later.
