France. The screening of the cult film “Last Tango in Paris” by Bertolucci was canceled

The screening of “Last Tango in Paris” was to take place this Sunday in the building of the French Cinematheque (Cinémathèque Française) in Paris as part of the Marlon Brando retrospective. However, as reported at the beginning of the week, the show was canceled. The decision was justified by the desire to “calm down tensions and in light of the potential threat to security,” France24 reported.

– We are a cinema, not a fortress. We cannot risk the safety of our staff and our audience, said Frédéric Bonnaud, director of Kinoteka, in an interview with AFP. – Aggressive people started making threats, and organizing this screening and debate was a completely disproportionate risk. So we had to resign, he added. Kinoteka had previously announced a “discussion with the audience” to discuss the issues raised in the film.

Among those who criticized the idea of ​​showing “Last Tango in Paris” was Judith Godrèche, an actress involved in the #MeToo movement. The French cinema star stated that showing the film without explaining the context of its creation would be disrespectful to the actress who played one of the main roles – Maria Schneider, who died in 2011. “It's time to wake up, dear Cinémathèque, and restore humanity to 19-year-old actresses (Schneider's age during the shooting of “Last Tango in Paris” – ed.), behaving like humans,” Godrèche wrote.

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“Last Tango in Paris” by Bernardo Bertolucci from 1972 was one of the most controversial, but also one of the most important films of the 1970s. The film, created on the wave of the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, told the story of the relationship between a young French woman (played by Maria Schneider) and an American (Marlon Brando) in his prime. They knew nothing about each other, they met to cross further erotic boundaries. After the film's premiere, Bertolucci said that the superficial vulgarity and eroticism used in the film referred to a completely different, deeper image of the human condition.

Maria Schneider made allegations against Bertolucci and Brando back in the 1970s, but her accusations “were largely ignored,” France24 reported, citing the recent documentary “Maria.” In “The Last Tango…” a rape scene was shown, in which the director allegedly used an unaware, 19-year-old actress to show a brutal scene in an extremely realistic way. Schneider later spoke publicly many times about the mental problems and drug addiction that allegedly resulted from this scene.

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Bertolucci confessed in 2013 that the details of this scene “were his and Marlon Brando's idea, which they came up with on the morning of the day they shot it.” He added that he wanted to film Maria Schneider's reaction in that scene “as a girl, not as an actress.” The media recalled this statement by the Italian creator in connection with the celebration of the World Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in 2016.

His words have now been recalled, and many in the film industry have expressed their outrage. As reported by “The Guardian”, there were voices to deprive the Italian filmmaker of his film awards – at least the American and British ones. Bertolucci's achievements included two Oscarstwo Golden Globes and a BAFTA award.

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Due to the controversy, Bertolucci issued a statement in 2016 in which he wrote that the media uproar was based on an “absurd misunderstanding.” “Someone thought, and still thinks, that Maria was not informed about the violence against her. It's not true! Maria knew about everything because she read the script in which everything was described,” he said. He claimed that the actress was only not informed about some details of the scene because “we wanted her spontaneous reaction.”