As France reels from a renewed #MeToo reckoning, a new film transports audiences back to the early 1970s when directors were all-powerful and the consent of their actresses was the last thing on their mind. "Being Maria", which premiered out of competition in Cannes, revisits one of the most infamous rape scenes in cinema -- Marlon Brando's butter-based sexual assault in the 1972 film "Last Tango in Paris". French director Jessica Palud said her own experience decades later inspired her to make the film.
"I worked as an assistant on several films, I saw things on sets -- humiliated actors, ways of working that struck me," Palud, 42, told AFP. "Being Maria" follows Maria Schneider's rise to fame after Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci cast her in "Last Tango in Paris", and its impact on her life and career. In the notorious "butter scene", Schneider, who was 19 at the start of shooting, is depicted as being anally raped by the middle-aged Brando on a Paris apartment floor with the aid of a lump of butter.
"Being Maria" stars Matt Dillon as Brando, while Anamaria Vartolomei -- who broke out in the abortion drama "Happening" -- plays Schneider as an aspiring actress not fully briefed about how the scene will play out. "What I wanted to understand was what she felt," said Palud, who herself started out as a 19-year-old crew member on the set of another racy Bertolucci film, "The Dreamers", in 2003. She said she tracked down the original script for "Last Tango in Paris", which .