Movie Nation

The scene, like the movie it dominates, was infamous before anybody outside of the production had seen it.

The movie was stilted, strange, shocking and controversial, even in the hypersexualized “art cinema” of the ’70s. And the title, “Last Tango in Paris,” has been a cultural touchstone, punchline and “pornographic” dividing line ever since.

“Being Maria” is a film that tries and mostly succeeds in immersing us in the experience of the French actress Maria Schneider, cast and almost certainly abused and exploited in a movie that would both make her name, and ruin it, to say nothing of the psychological damage it probably left her with.

Based on a biographical memoir by Schneider’s journalist-cousin Vanessa Schneider, Jessica Palud’s film hinges on “that scene,” and exacts a form of revenge on director Bernardo Bertolucci and “Tango” as she does. She makes him cruel and pretentious and his film more inane and indulgent than most critics treated it at the time.

Anamaria Vartolomei — she was “Kai” in “Mickey 17” and Haydee in the most recent “Count of Monte-Cristo” — portrays Schneider from her teen introduction to film and through the trauma of making “Last Tango,” suggesting the lasting damage and hurt it caused as she struggled to overcome it, professionally and psychologically.

Maria’s single mom Marie (Marie Gillain) raised her alone and flies into a fury when her schoolgirl daughter gets stars in her eyes when she spends time with her estranged father, the famous French film actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal). Gélin, who worked with Ophuls and Hitchcock, had an affair with her mother and didn’t leave his wife for her and wasn’t a part of Maria’s life.

Until, that is, she hit her teens, reconnected with him, spent time on sets and used her gorgeous looks and nepo baby connections to sign with his agent. But she was still a complete unknown when the director of “The Conformist” and “The Spider’s Stratagem” cast her in the movie that her father insisted would “make” her.

Casting the handsome Giuseppe Maggio of Italian romcoms like Netflix’s “Out of My League” and “Four to Dinner” is another way our director takes a shot at the late Bernado Bertolucci.

“On my films,” Maggio’s Bernardo pretentiously intones, “there are no actors, no actresses. Only characters!“

The very young and inexperienced Schneider adapts to the “intensity” Bertolucci wants his players to bring to his talkative chance encounter May-October affair film about sex and “love” and boundaries in an age of ennui. And she gets over her awe of her co-star, 47 years old and “fat,” but still dashing and still the greatest screen actor of his generation.

Matt Dillon gives us just a hint of Marlon Brando’s voice, letting the years, the hair and the presence get across the essence of a bored film actor interested in being challenged by a tyro Italian filmmaker, but also so comfortable in the power imbalance in this industry, on this set making this male-wish-fulfillment fantasy with an inexperienced teen treated as if any “surprise” the men in charge pull on her to get her to register shock is fair game.

“It’s only a film,” he purrs, in French, after the infamous “butter” scene, which leaves Schneider in tears.

“There’s no such thing as ‘bad press,'” her movie star dad assures her when the notoriety of that moment spreads long before the film’s release.

But Maria, in this film account of her reaction anyway, knows better than to let Bertolucci’s “Good, very good” after yelling “cut” pass.

“No, NO Bernardo,” she says (in French with English subtitles). “That was NOT good!”

The film leaves Bertolucci as a sketched-in villain, one of the giants of the cinema of his day reduced to crude manipulations, ganging up with his star on the ingenue in his care on his set. Having met and interviewed him when his not-nearly-as-exploitative but still kind of icky “Stealing Beauty” came out, that seems a fair shot. Liv Tyler, the young starlet of “Stealing Beauty,” got off easy.

Brando is likewise something of a cypher here, more a “character” or “figure” than an actor who flatters and flirts and tries to reassure but fails utterly to protect his powerless, naive and much younger co-star.

And there’s a familiarity to Maria’s life after “Last Tango” that leaves her new interest in clubbing, random pick-ups and needle drug addiction depressing if not wholly surprising.

She appeared in other iconic films — Antonioni’s “The Passenger,” a well-regarded ’90s “Jane Eyre.” But as Palud and co-screenwriter Laurette Polmanss show us, her career was for decades a series of awkward public encounters with people who hated “Last Tango,” which got banned in some countries, and asked or unasked questions from the press about her most infamous movie.

But in this film account based on a memoir by her cousin, we take comfort in how “Last Tango” hardened Maria Schneider, toughened her up and made her “difficult” by reputation. She stands up against the typecast demands that she take her shirt.

She walked off the infamous “Caligula” and a role that had to be recast when she refused to appear nude in it. Smart.

Did the devotion of a loyal lover (Céleste Brunnquell) save her from her “Tango” entangled demons? Even if that never happened, “Being Maria” allows us the comfort of hoping so.

Rating: unrated, sexual violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Giuseppe Maggio, Céleste Brunnquell, Yvan Attal, Marie Gillain and Matt Dillon.

Credits: Directed by Jessica Palud, scripted by Laurette Polmanss and Jessica Palud, based on a memoir by Vanessa Schneider. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:43