The scene that haunted a life

  The prurient use of butter in Last Tango in Paris resulted in one the most notorious scenes in cinema history. Released amid great controversy in 1972, Last Tango teamed Marlon Brando, 48 at the time of filming, with Maria Schneider, who was 19.  

    Schneider wasn't informed about the "butter," which would become part of a depiction of anal rape in a movie that focused on a sustained sexual encounter. Schneider later said she felt as if she had been raped by both Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was 30 when he made Last Tango.

   That scene and how it impacted Schneider's life is at the core of Being Maria, a sketchy portrait of Schneider's rise to fame and her awakening to what she regarded as an act of exploitation that continued to color how audiences perceived her.

   Directed by Jessica Palud, Being Maria stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider. I mentioned age in the early part of this review because the movie's issues of power imbalance -- related to both age and fame -- remain relevant.

    Palud smartly recreates the events leading up to Last Tango and shows the movie's filming with Matt Dillon doing a credible Brando, although it's difficult to watch him without being aware of how he captures Brando's intonations and facial expressions. Still, it's a gutsy thing for an actor to attempt and Dillon pulls it off.

  As Bertolucci, Guiseppe Maggio conveys the director's manipulative approach. He wanted to capture raw emotion, which is why he didn't tell Schneider that butter would be used in a scene that left her feeling crushed and humiliated. 

  The story begins when Maria's mother (Marie Gillain) throws Maria out of her house for meeting with her father, actor Daniel Gelin (Yvan Attal). Until that meeting, Gelin had played almost no role in Maria's life. Her volatile mother was furious about her daughter's interest in a father whose last name she didn't even use.

   Schneider's career continued after Last Tango, but she became addicted to heroin and never seemed to recover from the storm created by Last Tango. A judgmental portion of the public didn't always separate the fiction of Last Tango from reality, and Schneider suffered as a result.

   The movie's last act focuses on Schneider's relationship with Noor (Celeste Brunnquell), a young woman who meets Schneider while doing a dissertation on the actress. The relationship becomes sexual and taxing as Schneider falls into a cycle of drug abuse and rehabilitation.

 Though handled a little too didactically, the movie's issues still resonate, but Being Maria slows once the Last Tango filming wraps, perhaps because Schneider's bouts with heroin follow a familiar pattern. Star rises. Star is too young to handle notoriety. Star falls into a self-destructive spiral.

 Palud, who worked with Bertolucci, and Vartolomei capture the sometimes impassive way a tumultuous life seems to be happening to Schneider, as she slowly learns to assert herself.

  Being Maria may best be viewed as a semi-biopic. The film concludes in 1980 with Schneider doing publicity for Jacques Rivette's Merry-Go-Round. Schneider never quite faded into a washed-up world. She was praised for her work in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) and appeared in a variety of other movies until 2008. She died of breast cancer in 2011 at the age of 58.

   Mostly, though, Schneider remains known for Last Tango, which makes for the most intriguing part of Being Maria, a film that can't help but lose steam when it's most intriguing chapter passes, leaving only bad vibes in its wake.

Brando on Brando. Irresistible

Watching Listen to Me Marlon is like hearing Marlon Brando deliver his own eulogy. That's because this revealing, strange and sometimes poetic documentary is built around a series of audio-tapes Brando recorded in his California home.

That's not to say that director Stevan Riley's movie is an exercise in Brandoesque self-congratulation. Brando can be self-critical, insecure and emotionally vulnerable, and there are times when we wonder whether he's the most reliable of narrators.

Still, listening to Brando seldom is anything less than fascinating. He tells us he fretted over whether he could play Don Corleone in The Godfather; he says Francis Ford Coppola made him the scapegoat for delays in the filming of Apocalypse Now. He tells us how he felt about Bernardo Bertolucci, who took him a little too close to the edge in Last Tango in Paris. He speaks of finding a tropical paradise in Tahiti, after a miserable experience making Mutiny on the Bounty.

Early on, Brando sings the praises of Stella Adler, the acting teacher who taught him the vaunted Method at her studio soon after he moved to New York.

We get the feeling, though, that the Method isn't all that made Brando into his generation's best actor: Adler quickly realized that Brando's gift was a special one. Her belief in Brando helped him believe in himself.

And, yes, there are personal revelations: Brando talks about his alcoholic, mentally disturbed mother and a father so abusive that Brando wouldn't let him near his own children.

Brando's children were a source of joy and tragedy for him. In 1990, Brando's son Christian stood trial for shooting his step-daughter's boyfriend. Christian spent five years in prison.

After Christian's arrest, a shaken Brando can be seen proclaiming that misery had found its way to his house.

Brando's daughter Cheyenne committed suicide in 1995. Christian died in 2008, four years after Brando's own death.

Riley bolsters the tapes with early interview footage of Brando, clips from movies, and snippets of home movies. The net result is an amazing foray into Brando's inner world -- from early high points when he was enjoying being the toast of Broadway to late-career disillusionment when he decided that the only thing that mattered in Hollywood was money.

How you react to Listen to Me Marlon depends in large measure on how large (no pun intended) Brando looms in your movie consciousness. (At one point, you'll hear Brando trying to talk himself into weight loss.)

Throughout the movie, Riley offers bits of a self-hypnosis exercise Brando taped. He was so great an actor that he could make himself his own audience.

I was more moved by Listen to Me Marlon than any other movie I've seen this year, perhaps because I've never been more affected by a performance than the one Brando gave in On the Waterfront. I saw it as a kid, and have seen it many times since then. It never fails to astonish me.

I don't know if Brando intended for anyone ever to hear these tapes, and I wondered if the movie weren't somehow a post-mortem invasion of his privacy.

In the end, though, I decided to receive this impressive documentary with gratitude. I was more than happy that someone gave Brando have the last word. A genius deserves nothing less.