The director of the French film library, Frédéric Bonnaud, has sparked heated controversy in recent days for some statements in which he questions the sexual violence suffered by the actress Maria Schneider during the filming of The last tango in Paris (1972), a film directed by the Italian Bernardo Bertolucci and in which the actor shared the cast with Marlon Brando. The film includes an anal rape scene, which was not included in the original script and not consented to by the actress, who was 19 at the time. Brando, 48 years old.
“Maria Schneider was mistreated, used. But no, she did not suffer sexual abuse. She is the one who says it, that she was not sexually assaulted. It is false,” Bonnaud said in front of an amphitheater full of film students. It was last October 22nd, during a meeting at the Sorbonne University. His words caused outrage, some tried to deny him, others left the room. Finally, the students reported the incident to the centre’s management, believing that Bonnaud’s words constituted, according to the French media, “an excuse for rape”. Mediapart.
The director of the film library expressed his opinion when a student asked him about the cancellation, just a year ago, of the screening of Last tango in Paris in the film library. It had been scheduled as part of a retrospective on Marlon Brando, but was canceled after protests from several feminist associations, who denounced that this film is a symbol of violence against women in the world of cinema.
“The last time I heard Maria Schneider talk about this story, she said that she didn’t look bad in the film in front of Marlon. She calls him Marlon… It’s quite clear,” said Bonnaud, who called it “delusional” that one could think that “a director like Bertolucci, a communist, politically committed, could organize a rape on a set.” Questioned by the students, he invited them to ask themselves “how things are changing in favor of censorship”.
According to the story that some of them told Mediapart, the director of the film archive crowned his comment by underlining that, after all, then “the law (on sexual violence) did not exist and she did not report it”. Dozens of students left the amphitheater. Not content with this, he also paid tribute to director Jean Claude Brisseau, now deceased and convicted in 2005 of sexual assault on two actresses.
The anal rape scene, in which Marlon Brando uses butter as lubricant, caused a lot of controversy already after the film’s release in 1972. The actress always said that it was not in the script and it took her by surprise. He had not given his consent. Bertolucci himself admitted much later that they had not warned her: “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. I wanted her to play her humiliation and her anger.”
In 2024 it will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival Maryfilm by French director Jessica Palud, which recounts the trauma that sequence caused the actress. It was his first role. In a 2007 interview she said: “They told me before we shot the scene and I was very angry. I felt a little violated, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”
In an email sent to the management of the Sorbonne, the students of the film school denounce the “false statements, contrary to the word of the victim” and “very violent” towards the women who were present in the amphitheater at the time of the meeting.
“They support rape and deny the existence of marital rape,” they denounce. They point out that his words “are in total disagreement with the University’s commitments to combating sexual and sexist violence”. They also criticize the screening of films by directors such as Roman Polanski, convicted of raping a minor, or Woody Allen, accused of incest by his adopted daughter.
Bonnaud was appointed director of the French film library in January 2016. It is not the first time that his views have caused discomfort. In 2017, some feminist organizations criticized her “sexist and misogynistic” statements, when she referred to feminists as “half-mad” who “try to impose a totalitarian confrontation”.
The affair provoked a reaction from the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, who “strongly condemned” the public statements of the director of the film archive, which “are his opinion, which does not involve the institution but damages the image of the film archive”. In a statement he asks the president and the board of directors of the film library to quickly examine the measures to be taken following the accident.
This controversy amplifies the Me Too movement in French cinema in recent years. Last March, the French Assembly published a devastating report denouncing the “endemic and systematic” sexual violence suffered by some in cinema, filming and casting. The Assembly created a commission of inquiry to analyze this plague after the wave of complaints from actresses, including several women who accuse one of the emblems of French cinema, the actor Gerard Depardieu, of sexual harassment.
