Last Tango in Paris was both a breakout role and turning point in the life and career of Maria Schneider––a traumatic filming experience that inspired her to become an advocate for women in the film industry, and the often redundant depictions of female characters in cinema. Her steadfastness and increasing ability to not suffer fools gladly after her experiences with Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando saw her walk out on several major directors midway through shooting, earning her a reputation for being difficult, frustrations largely ignored as this behavior coincided with her own battles with mental health and drug addiction, both of which were weaponized as reasons to not hire her. Any writing on Schneider characterizes her most famous role as an albatross around her neck, which saw her turn down any role that felt like it would similarly corner her in an unsafe working condition, which could make for an interesting retrospective look on her career if dramatized adequately. Unfortunately, director Jessica Palud’s biopic Being Maria is uninterested in Schneider’s career beyond the context of that film, of which it spends its vast majority doing extensive, beat-for-beat recreations.
Anamaria Vartolomei, most recently seen breathing life into a thankless role in Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, plays Schneider here, and similarly finds depth in a one-dimensional characterization that waters the actress’ career down to clichéd biopic highs and lows. The opening stretch, despite taking factual liberties in the way you would expect from this genre, does at least offer promise, as the 16-year-old aims to reconnect with estranged father Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal), a character actor her aggrieved mother has warned her against. After meeting him, her mom throws her out on the streets in anger, and she tries securing an agent despite no prior acting experience, hoping her family name will help her. It’s an interesting perspective on nepotism, but the film instead time jumps to her first meeting with Bertolucci (Giuseppe Maggio) three years later––anything unrelated to Last Tango In Paris is deemed purely expository, if not downright inconvenient.
I can’t argue against the filmmakers choosing to focus extensively on what would be a traumatic shoot––and what would become her most famous role––as a major focal point, as it will likely be the first thing associated with her in the cultural imagination. But her life’s work is watered-down to revolving around this alone, anything that came before or after living in its shadow, and all of her lingering health issues diagnosed from being part of it. Being Maria doesn’t aim to explore how the shoot affected its star; once she’s wrapped filming, every scene is another time jump to a pivotal life moment Palud opts not to unpack in greater detail, working under the false impression audiences won’t be interested in any part of a career that’s not adjacent to controversy, making the character study even shallower than it was to start with.
Vartolomei’s performance gives the impression that there was meatier material on the page to work with, but the film’s final third––which struggles to hide its disinterest in her later career, caring solely about the personal troubles it nevertheless waters down––reduces its subject’s life to bullet points in a way even the actress struggles to overcome. For all of the clear disdain Palud has for the way Brando (played here by Matt Dillon, who doesn’t completely avoid caricature) and Bertolucci exploited their young collaborator, she does appear most motivated by the opportunity to recreate their movie in extensive detail.
A more interesting, incisive biopic would have used that clear interest in this source material as a jumping-off point to explore the personal, emotional reactions to unsavory, “problematic” art, and our attachments and fascinations towards films created by artists mired in controversy. Yet it doesn’t even do justice to Schneider’s own reckoning with the film that catapulted her to the A-list, with the artistic decisions she made to regain agency after being publicly stripped of it only getting referenced in passing. If anything, it’s quite insulting to the actress’ legacy for a movie to suggest that there’s more to her body of work than one traumatic experience, and then largely ignore anything that can’t be directly traced back to it. This is a film that acts as if Schneider faded back into obscurity overnight, her subsequent collaborations with Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Rivette brought up by the character of Maria as jobs she took to pay the bills, which conflicts with the actress’ personal accounts of her work.
There are far worse examples of biopics than Being Maria, but it shares their lack of curiosity in their subjects as a core trait. It’s fascinated by the traumatic situation its protagonist found herself in while making the career it preceded a footnote, unable to articulate the way it shaped her growth as an artist beyond a reductive downward-spiral narrative. I can’t pretend I’m a scholar on Maria Schneider’s life and work, but even I can sense this is sorely lacking.
Being Maria opens in theaters on Friday, March 21.