hue in the film. Storaro later told a reporter that
, Bertolucci and Storaro took
inspiration from Bacon's paintings by using "rich oranges, light and
cool grays, icy whites, and occasional reds combine[d] with Bertolucci's
own tasteful choices of soft browns, blond browns, and delicate whites
with bluish and pink shadings.
Maria Schneider RIP
LAST TANGO IN PARIS was the hottest film of 1972 this side of the XXX
hits DEEP THROAT and BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR. Audiences were
enthralled
by the full-frontal nude scenes between the cinema icon Marlon Brando
and the lithe ingenue Maria Schneider. The young actress was a protege
of Brigitte Bardot. Nothing in the script had forewarned the 20 year-old
about an improvised sex duet with Brando during which he greased her
naked flesh with butter in preparation for anal sex.
The sex was
faked,
but Schneider’s tears were real, for in her words, “I felt humiliated
and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by
Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize.
Thankfully, there was just one take.”
Her salary for the
entire film was $4000.
No one paid Schneider for the everlasting infamy, for LAST TANGO IN
PARIS enraged audiences around the world. New York critics labelled the
film ‘pornography’. Protesters fought with movie-goers in New Jersey and
church leaders descried the film the end of morality. The director and
Brando were awarded Oscars for LAST TANGO, despite the controversy. Few
people
worried about the effects of Bertolucci’s brutal treatment of his lead actress.
Schneider struggled throughout the 70s with by
drug addiction,
overdoses, and a suicide attempt. She was lucky to have survived that
period and her career lasted into the 90s, although the Frenchwoman
never attained the acclaim of LAST TANGO IN PARIS. I saw the film at the
Orson Welles Theater. I fantasized about sex with Maria Schneider for
months, even after she declared herself as bisexual. Actually that
statement might have rekindled my interests, however our paths never
crossed in the following decades. I mourn her passing and hope that she
is at rest.
Her
beauty will be another light in the stars.
Brando also once told Elia Kazan, “Here I am a balding, middle-aged
failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act.” It isn’t that he didn’t
think he was good; it’s that he didn’t think being good at acting
amounted to much. As far as Brando was concerned, he was a genius at an
idiotic pursuit.He approached Hollywood—once he got around to
approaching it at all—as if it was “one big cash register,” as he told
an interviewer when he arrived in 1950 for his first film, The Men.
He wasn’t happy to be there, wasn’t grateful for the opportunity, and
didn’t try to hide it. “The only reason I’m here,” he famously said, “is
because I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.”
Brando wasn’t Bertolucci’s first choice for the role. The
character—American in the finished film—was originally French, and
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Alain Delon had all
turned the role down. Brando’s name was brought up by the film’s
producer, Alberto Grimaldi, who was then suing the actor for causing
delays during the shooting of another of his films, director Gillo
Pontecorvo’s 1969
Burn!. Grimaldi offered to drop the suit if Brando would appear in
Tango. Brando, who had walked off the set of
Burn! to protest the treatment of Colombian extras and was likely to lose the case, agreed.
After signing up for
Tango, Brando came to Paris, where he and
Bertolucci holed up in an apartment and talked. The talking went on for
weeks. Bertolucci laid himself bare, revealing childhood pains, private
aspirations, personal secrets. Brando did the same. Brando, who had once
broken a paparazzo’s jaw, had always been intensely private, but
Bertolucci drew him out. Brando had been in psychotherapy since the
1950s and knew well where his soft spots were, the sources of his
depression and instability, even if he never seemed to escape them: his
mother was a binge drinker who regularly abandoned Brando and his
sisters without warning for weeks at a time; his father was an
alcoholic, bullying, emotionally abusive womanizer who quite thoroughly
convinced Marlon he was worthless
As Brando and Bertolucci collaborated on the story, the character of
Paul stopped being Bertolucci, and started being Brando. In his memoir,
Brando writes plainly, “[Bertolucci] wanted me to play myself, to
improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical
mirror of me.” Bertolucci, who spoke little English and had no grasp of
American slang, let Brando write or improvise nearly all his lines.
Unlike so many previous roles, the pain in
Tango doesn’t just lurk around the edges of the performance. It
is the performance
Early in the film, for example, he stands in the hotel bathroom where
his wife killed herself and listens to a maid—busy scrubbing the blood
from the tile—recount being questioned by the police about Paul’s
background. She says she told them that:
“[Paul] became an actor,
bongo player, revolutionary in South America, journalist in Japan, one
day he lands in Tahiti, hangs around, learns French. Then he went to
Paris. There he meets a woman with money and marries her. Since then,
what has your boss done? Nothing.”
In most movies, this is
exposition. But not here. Every item listed is a ghost of something from
Brando’s life or career, from Tahiti, where he owned an island, to
Paris, where he now finds himself. And the most telling point of all,
the question at the end of it: What does it all add up to, this life
he’s led? What has he accomplished? Nothing. All during the speech
Brando stands mute, offering not a word of contradiction.
Near the end of shooting
Tango, Brando learned that his
thirteen-year-old son, Christian, had been kidnapped from his boarding
school. It would turn out to be a plot by Brando’s unstable, alcoholic
first wife, Anna Kashfi, to keep Brando from gaining custody. Brando
hired private detectives, who found the boy under a pile of dirty
laundry in a tent in the Mexican desert. It was a sensational incident
that set the tone for decades of sensational incidents to follow, many
involving his children, and violence or death: there were years of
custody fights, lawsuits, divorces, and compulsive womanizing, and in
1990 Christian would shoot and kill the boyfriend of his half-sister,
Cheyenne, in Marlon’s home. Marlon whisked Cheyenne, who’d been mentally
unstable for years, out of the country to prevent her giving any
damning testimony against Christian. He hired a cadre of celebrity
lawyers to defend Christian. There were even charges that Marlon
tampered with the crime scene. He avoided as long as he could giving his
own eye-witness testimony. Christian would eventually be found guilty
of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cheyenne was never
the same after the shooting, and after several unsuccessful attempts,
committed suicide in 1995. Brando, an absentee parent for so long,
pursued his children at the end, just as Paul had pursued Jeanne, and in
the end they all got away.
“When Last Tango in Paris was finished,” Brando wrote in his memoir,
“I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally
to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want
to suffer like that anymore… In subsequent pictures I stopped trying to
experience the emotions of my characters as I had always done before
and simply [tried] to act the part in a technical way. The
audience doesn’t know the difference.”
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