Jessica Palud’s film is called Maria. Believing in a biopic on Maria Callas, I went there thinking that I would at least hear some great opera arias. When I realized that it was a film about Maria Schneider, I understood that destiny had knocked again on the door of my absent-mindedness, because I had just finished the chapter of the novel that I try to write about Maria, about What a Flash!the film she shot in 1971, a few months before Last Tango in Paris which hit the headlines because of a scene where Marlon Brando sodomizes Maria Schneider on the broken parquet floor of this large, filthy apartment, unfurnished, unrentable as it is, but magnificent, facing south, overlooking the skytrain of the romantic station Passy.
After some preliminaries like “I would like to know what’s in your piggy bank”, Marlon pins Maria Schneider to the ground, opens her jeans, by force, while acrobatically bringing back the plate of butter with the tip of his foot. conveniently placed there by the props designer. He then dips his fingers into the plate, takes out a certain quantity of butter which he applies between the actress’s buttocks and, they say, the bastard really stuck his fingers in the actress’s behind. . A useless act since it is not shown, but claimed as necessary by the director wishing to capture the expression of surprise, fear and pain, and the real tears on the actress’s face.
What follows is a more ordinary act of copulation, the reality of which does not resist viewing. But no matter, the damage was done. Because from then on, for years and years, we no longer looked at a plate of butter without thinking of Maria Schneider, and above all, we no longer thought of her, no longer talked about her, no longer went to see her. his films without this scene coming to our minds which we therefore did not even need to have seen, what is the point of bothering to go see a film lasting two and a quarter hours, when the essential two minutes are so well told by friends who haven’t seen the film either?
Fifty years of uninterrupted scandal
I remember the hilarity aroused by the mention of this scene, I also remember that it didn’t make me laugh much, but that I chuckled all the same, so as not to be noticed, above all to remain discreet, that people don’t ask me if I knew anything about sodomy; you quickly become the target of ribald behavior, at the age I was.
And then, I met Maria on the set of What a Flash!. She had annoyed me a little, at the time, with her big baby Cadum cheeks, she had arrived on the set, dressed all in white, on the arm of a mustachioed man also dressed all in white, just to show that They were a close couple and they didn’t think they were shit. We both had as many words to say, a dozen. I was the altar boy, while she had a scene where she played the Virgin. But this bitch refused to put a veil on her head: “What for? I’m in white, that’s enough for me, I’m the Virgin.” Her arrogant beauty made her undrinkable.
A few years after the release of Last Tangoduring a magazine interview, Maria explains that she felt “a little violated” after filming the scene.
I hadn’t seen the film at the time. But in fifty years of uninterrupted scandal, how many extracts: it’s incalculable, without ever seeing the scene with the stick of butter. It took an irrational moment to lead me to watch Jessica Palud’s film for the pressing need to rent Bertolucci’s film. The comparison is edifying between the scene as he shot it and Palud’s reconstruction of it. An edifying experience beyond the scene itself, for what it says about male violence, that of the film directors who think they are, by the way.
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