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      Why ‘Last Tango in Paris’ Derailed Maria Schneider’s Life

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      “Being Maria” uses the actress’s own words to show how the star’s frank discussion of the experience was an early salvo in the #MeToo movement.In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from “Last Tango in Paris,” a film she had made 11 years earlier. “No,” she said, pleadingly. “I’d rather not.”Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that movie depicts the heated sexual relationship between a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne (Schneider), and an older American expat, Paul (Marlon Brando). What ended up making “Tango” more infamous than famous was a scene in which Paul forces himself on Jeanne, with the help of a smear of butter.That scene would haunt Schneider, who died at 58 in 2011, the rest of her life. In a 2007 interview, she said that the moment had been sprung upon her with no warning: “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”It’s easy to see why this posed a moral and ethical problem for the director Jessica Palud, whose new film, “Being Maria,” stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando.“That was the big question mark when we started writing our film: Do we re-enact the scene or not?” Palud said in a video interview from France. “Everybody I talked to who had known Maria mentioned the trauma caused by that scene, so I just couldn’t avoid it.”“Being Maria” starts with Schneider observing her father, the well-known French actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) on a set. She is fascinated by the world of filmmaking, and right away we are conscious of the importance of who is watching and who is being watched. When, not long after, the 19-year-old Maria is cast in “Tango” and becomes the focus of attention, Palud felt it was important to continue to concentrate on the woman’s gaze.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Being Maria’ Review: The Muse’s Side of the Story

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      Starring Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon, this French drama chronicles the life of the actress Maria Schneider after her traumatic experience on the set of “Last Tango in Paris.”When it comes to telling stories about the victims of abuse, filmmakers are often faced with a dilemma: to show or not show the act of violence. Showing could mean exploiting the victim’s pain to satisfy viewers’ curiosity; not showing could mean hedging around a hard truth.Jessica Palud’s “Being Maria” — a biopic of Maria Schneider, a French actress perhaps best known for playing the mistress of Marlon Brando’s character in “Last Tango in Paris” — chooses to show.In 1972, when the 19-year-old Schneider was shooting one of the film’s many sex scenes, Brando (with the director Bernardo Bertolucci’s blessing) improvised without telling her his intentions, using a stick of butter to perform what on-screen looks like anal penetration.“Being Maria” recreates the scene — and it’s a tough watch. Anamaria Vartolomei, who plays Schneider, conveys shock, discomfort, fear and shame in distressing close-ups. When the scene cuts, Brando (Matt Dillon), who had previously been chummy with Maria, looks sheepish. Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) is unapologetic; he tells Maria the scene was meant to be intense.Loosely adapted from the memoir “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” by Vanessa Schneider, the film doesn’t stick around too long on Bertolucci’s set. Benjamin Biolay’s treacly string score adds an unsavory sentimental touch, but the rest of the film is quite sober as it moves through the decade of Schneider’s life after “Last Tango.”Showing how Schneider’s trauma festered over time — and eventually calloused over — the film moodily weaves together scenes of her struggles with addiction, nights at the discothèque and experiences on other movie sets, relying on Vartolomei’s edgy, delicate performance to signal Maria’s underlying anxieties. If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.Being MariaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Do You Know the Classic Works That Inspired These Popular Family Movies?

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      “The Lion King,” first released as an animated film in 1994, has spawned multiple adaptations and sequels, including Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway production and a soundtrack companion album by Beyoncé for the 2019 computer-enhanced movie version. The plot of the story, about a young lion finding his place in the world, has been compared to which play by William Shakespeare? More

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      Sasha Stone, an Original Oscars Blogger, Takes on Hollywood

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      Sasha Stone, who has been covering awards season since the ’90s, has recast herself as a voice against what she perceives as the industry’s liberal status quo.Earlier this month Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that “Anora,” the frantic story of a New York stripper’s romance with a young Russian man, took top honors as part of a historic haul.Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become one of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscars blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented — often onscreen. She says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world.“Here is where I run into problems with the right,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They’re never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be, ‘The Oscars suck,’ and I was going to have to stand apart from that.”Stone’s advice to the right: Take the win. And after some Monday-morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content (just one brief comment about President Trump by the host, Conan O’Brien) and for Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech, in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids — “relatable to any middle-American,” said a Daily Caller writer.Mikey Madison in the Oscar-winning “Anora,” a favorite of Stone’s. NeonStone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life: an apostate from the mainstream, in recovery from her earlier liberalism. During the 2010s, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she had been out in front, celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the Controversy Surrounding Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Remake

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      Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous.But the studio was feeling cocky.It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as movies with real actors. The remakes also made bedrock characters like Cinderella newly relevant. Heroines defined by ideas from another era — be pretty, and things might work out! — were empowered. Casting emphasized diversity.Why not tackle Snow White?Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernize her story — to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as “the fairest of them all” because of her “white as snow” skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney.“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which premiered in 1937, posed other remake challenges, including how to sensitively handle Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. (One stalled Disney reboot had reimagined the dwarfs as kung fu fighters in China.)Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out. They had some new ideas. More important, the remake gravy train needed to keep running.“It’s going to be amazing, another big win,” Bob Chapek, then Disney’s chief executive, said of a live-action “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” at a 2022 fan convention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Wes Anderson’s World, It’s All About the Details

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      When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Severance’ Uses Old Tricks to Make Its Office Hell

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      Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale.In “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the “innie” doing all the work and the “outie” remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways “Severance” invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.IsolationRepetition Removes IndividualityFrom the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.Films like “The Apartment,” from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar’s 2004 animated movie “The Incredibles” (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create “company men,” said Jill Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of “The American Success Myth on Film.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Misericordia’ Review: Danger Always Hides in the Bushes

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      The French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film, a bent kind of murder mystery, presents life at its basest and gamiest.In “Misericordia,” a rakish youngish guy named Jérémie drives back to a French village for the funeral of his old boss, a baker, who has kicked the bucket at 62. And the instant the widow lets Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) into the living room, he and the baker’s adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a mushroom forager, share the sort of charged eye contact that tells you “Yup, these two definitely did it.” We don’t know when or how far things went. Something happened, though. But because “Misericordia” (Latin for “mercy”) has wafted from the cauldron of the writer and director Alain Guiraudie, it’s possible I’m wrong.Ambiguity? Mixed motives? Casual lawlessness? These are his considerable strengths. “Misericordia” culminates in kink, killing and some gloriously literal deus ex machina. So maybe what I’m experiencing as an erotic charge is caution. But again: it’s Guiraudie, the man who brought us the 2014 murder-at-the-gay-nude-beach sensation “Stranger by the Lake” and a bedroom farce (“Nobody’s Hero,” 2023) whose component parts included racism, terrorism, sex work, domestic violence, paranoia, jogging and vaping. The caution is erotic.His movies, meanwhile, prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It’s risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it.Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest. So I trust my instincts about Jérémie and Vincent. I know hunger when I see it. And “Misericordia” is dotted with hungry eyes. Jérémie stays the night at the widow’s. The room she offers is the one Vincent grew up in, maybe the room where It Happened. Jérémie and Vincent even make the bed together. But rekindling’s not on the program. Regression, maybe. The bed all made, Vincent — who’s pushing 40, is bald, and has a lisp and a cleft lip — suggests playing some Yahtzee, like they used to. Jérémie declines.From there, reunion curdles into disunion. And the homecoming movie you might have been wanting becomes the funkier tale of a sociopath who opts to overstay his welcome. Jérémie doesn’t get up to much: the occasional drive around town, a walk in the forest, some horseplay with Vincent on the forest floor where he should be foraging for mushrooms. What does he want? The late baker’s clothes, for one thing; his shoes, too. The widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems super OK with that. She doesn’t even appear to mind the probability that Jérémie’s list of infatuations likely included her husband. They flip through a photo album together and admire how good the dead man looked in a Speedo. (They’re not wrong.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More