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Last Tango

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Bernardo Bertolucci Hollywood Walk of Fame.jpg
By Sarah Ackerman from New York, USA CC BY 2.0, Link

This has been floating around for a bit, but still

It’s known as one of the most infamous rape scenes in Hollywood history—but Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci admitted in a recently surfaced video that star Maria Schneider never consented to it.

Instead, Bertolucci confessed in the 2013 clip that he and Marlon Brando came up with the idea to shoot the assault scene in which Brando’s character uses a stick of butter to rape Schneider on screen. At the time, Brando was 48. Schneider was just 19.

“The sequence of the butter is an idea that I had with Marlon in the morning before shooting,” Bertulocci said in an event held at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2013. He added that he felt horrible “in a way” for his treatment of Schneider but defended himself, explaining that he “wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.”

“I wanted her to react humiliated,” he said. “I think she hated me and also Marlon because we didn’t tell her.” Even so, Bertolucci clarified that he didn’t “regret” how he decided to direct the scene.

“To obtain something I think you have to be completely free,” he said. “I didn’t want Maria to act her humiliation her rage, I wanted her to Maria to feel…the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for all of her life.”

Some thoughts:

  • If you had asked me yesterday to guess one rape scene in the history of cinema that involved an actual rape, this is the one I would have picked. In some horrible, perverse sense, Bertolucci and Brando got exactly what they wanted.
  • Imagine Bertolucci saying this: “I didn’t want Marlon to act his painful gunshot death, I wanted him to feel…as if he’d been shot. Then he hated me for all of his very short remaining life.”
  • Tragically, I’d bet that some people will view this as a vindication of Roman Polanski: “Everybody was doing it. And sure, maybe he raped a girl, but at least he didn’t film it.”

… good lord, folks; how deeply do we need to quibble about gradations of sexual assault, especially when both the victim and the perpetrator claim it was non-consensual?

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