Latest news with #CinémathèqueFrançaise
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Last Tango' Derailed Maria Schneider's Life. A New Film Takes Her Side.
In a 1983 interview for a French television show, the actress Maria Schneider was asked whether she would mind if the program broadcast a clip from 'Last Tango in Paris,' a film she had made 11 years earlier. 'No,' she said, pleadingly. 'I'd rather not.' Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, that movie depicts the heated sexual relationship between a young Frenchwoman, Jeanne (Schneider), and an older American expat, Paul (Marlon Brando). What ended up making 'Tango' more infamous than famous was a scene in which Paul forces himself on Jeanne, with the help of a smear of butter. That scene would haunt Schneider, who died at 58 in 2011, the rest of her life. In a 2007 interview, she said that the moment had been sprung upon her with no warning: 'I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.' It's easy to see why this posed a moral and ethical problem for the director Jessica Palud, whose new film, 'Being Maria,' stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider and Matt Dillon as Brando. 'That was the big question mark when we started writing our film: Do we re-enact the scene or not?' Palud said in a video interview from France. 'Everybody I talked to who had known Maria mentioned the trauma caused by that scene, so I just couldn't avoid it.' 'Being Maria' starts with Schneider observing her father, the well-known French actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal) on a set. She is fascinated by the world of filmmaking, and right away we are conscious of the importance of who is watching and who is being watched. When, not long after, the 19-year-old Maria is cast in 'Tango' and becomes the focus of attention, Palud felt it was important to continue to concentrate on the woman's gaze. 'I didn't want to reproduce Bertolucci's camera — it's not a remake of 'Tango' — so I tried to change the scene's point of view and do it from her perspective,' the director said. 'So we see her watching the crew, and the crew watching her. Her 'no' and her tears are real, she isn't acting anymore. We see the entire crew just waiting for the director to say 'cut.'' Palud (who got into the film industry as a 19-year-old intern on Bertolucci's 'The Dreamers' some two decades ago) had secured the original 'Tango' screenplay from the Cinémathèque Française archives. She could see for herself that the notorious scene was not in it, confirming Schneider's version. Naturally, work proceeded very differently on the 'Being Maria' shoot, which involved an intimacy coordinator, but the filming was still harrowing for Vartolomei. 'I couldn't stop crying that day — I think I had completely internalized Maria's anger, the violence of that scene,' the actress said in a video chat. 'Sometimes you tell yourself, 'Come on, you'd be trying to fight him off.' But you can't, it's a man twice your size and the violence is such that you feel completely alone. That's when I understood where Maria's sorrow came from: loneliness.' 'She was so shy that she could close herself off and had an inaccessible side,' Vartolomei added. 'She was really mysterious. That's why we rehearsed a lot — we were trying to find her. I struggled grasping her and even having portrayed her, she remains somewhat mysterious to this day.' Dillon, reached by phone, was open in his admiration for Brando, who meant a great deal to him as an actor, and he did like 'Tango' as a film. But he also acknowledged that something had gone very wrong. 'Having started acting at a very young age, I'm very sensitive to the exploitation thing,' Dillon said. 'So I had these kind of strange, paradoxical feelings going on.' The 'Tango' episode is a relatively small part of 'Being Maria,' but it is clearly pivotal, as it is in the book that inspired the film, 'My Cousin Maria Schneider.' In it, the journalist Vanessa Schneider offers an intimate take on an older family member whom she saw regularly while growing up and greatly admired. The book, delicately and affectionately, traces a tragic arc from Maria Schneider's childhood with a father who only started connecting with her when she was in her teens, through her attempts to shake off 'Tango,' her descent into heroin addiction and her efforts to find herself as an actress and as a woman. 'She suffered from what happened on the set and then from what happened when the movie came out,' Vanessa Schneider said via video from France. 'For puritanical viewers, she was an easy woman who made pornography. It was brutal for her, especially since it wasn't at all in her nature — she was pretty modest, reserved and fairly conservative in certain respects.' After 'Tango,' she turned down most scripts involving nudity, her cousin said. 'This created a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with,' Vanessa Schneider added. 'Then drugs came into the picture and she got this reputation in the industry as someone who wasn't reliable.' Schneider's own favorite among her films was the Michelangelo Antonioni drama 'The Passenger' (1975), in which she was magnetic opposite another American star, Jack Nicholson. The New York Times's Manohla Dargis called it Antonioni's 'greatest film' when it was rereleased in 2005. Whenever an interview would steer her toward 'Tango,' Maria Schneider often offered to talk about 'The Passenger' instead. Mainly she landed supporting parts, most notably in the 1979 drama 'La Dérobade' ('Memoirs of a French Whore' in the United States), for which she was nominated for a César Award (the French equivalent of an Oscar). Over the decades, a certain mystique has developed around the actress. 'It's a combination of things,' Vanessa Schneider said. 'Tango' was 'incredibly successful around the world. Entire generations saw it. Maria also had a strong personality, she was charismatic and had an impact on a lot of people.' 'They may not have seen many of her movies,' she continued, 'but for a generation she was emblematic thanks to her look, her voice, the way she expressed herself — you could tell she was outside the norm.' Schneider's reputation has also been restored thanks to the rediscovery of the directness with which she discussed the manipulations and violations filmmaking can involve, long before #MeToo and cases like the prosecution in the French courts of the director Christophe Ruggia, who was convicted in February of sexually assaulting the actress Adèle Haenel, who was a minor at the time. Commenting on the reaction to her film, Palud said, 'Many interviewers in France were telling me, 'It's wild, it sounds like something you'd hear in 2024.'' But, she noted, 'most of the words in the film are Maria's. It's what she said in the 1970s and '80s.' This may explain why Schneider seems to be in the zeitgeist. The director Elisabeth Subrin made the César-winning short 'Maria Schneider, 1983' (2022), in which three actresses re-enact the TV interview from that year. Last year, feminist groups and individuals asked the Cinémathèque to provide context around a planned screening of 'Tango,' which ended up being canceled altogether. And in January, the Parisian one-woman show 'Alone Like Maria' drew parallels between the experience of its star, Marilou Aussilloux, and that of Schneider. The late actress is casting a long shadow. Palud's film doesn't cover Schneider's childhood or years of illness. 'I wanted to end on a strong image,' the director explained, with Maria looking at the camera, saying that she's listening to us ('Je vous écoute'), and, in effect, encouraging us to speak. There was something 'almost political' about the scene, Palud added. 'My movie is like a report, unadorned: What do we do with this?'
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Wes Anderson's World, It's All About the Details
When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut 'Bottle Rocket,' the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie's props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing. So when he made his next movie, 'Rushmore' (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself. That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson's storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director's work. The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall. The Paris show includes over 500 exhibits, many of them well known to Anderson fans, including the candy pink hotel model that opens 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' several sardine-blue explorer outfits from 'The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,' and a luxurious fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in 'The Royal Tenenbaums.' Items like these are key to Anderson's signature style — heavy on retro fashion, symmetry and pastel colors — as popularized by Instagram and TikTok accounts, and documented in books and magazine spreads. But Johanna Agerman Ross, a curator at the Design Museum, said it was a 'misunderstanding' to think of Anderson as a director defined by a few stylistic tropes. He also had 'an extreme interest in the creative process,' Agerman Ross said, and he believed that, because even the smallest items help create a world onscreen, they needed to be 'fully formed pieces of art and design.' Some of Anderson's best known props took weeks or months to conceive and make, including a faux-Renaissance painting, 'Boy With Apple,' that appears in 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'; a vending machine that mixes and dispenses martinis from 'Asteroid City'; and painted Louis Vuitton luggage that appears in 'The Darjeeling Limited.' Agerman Ross said that while developing the exhibition she had spoken with craftspeople who told her that they had lengthy email correspondences with Anderson to discuss every detail of the props they were making, right down to tweaking fonts and colors for magazine covers that appear for milliseconds in 'The French Dispatch.' Matthieu Orléan, a curator at the Cinémathèque Française, said that Anderson's attention to detail shaped his projects from their beginnings. The exhibition includes a vitrine filled with yellow spiral-bound notebooks in which the director jotted down his ideas. They contain notes for scripts, in careful capital letters, and minute storyboards for scenes. The exhibition also includes a screen showing an animatic: a black-and-white animated storyboard that Anderson uses to show actors and crew how he wants scenes to appear onscreen. Orléan said that Anderson had produced these for all his movies since 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' in 2008, adding that the director then records himself reading the script over it so that the actors know how he wants the lines to be delivered. 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' Anderson's first stop-motion animation movie, was a turning point in his almost 30-year career. On a tour of the show earlier this week, Andy Gent, a model maker who has worked on seven Anderson movies, said that the director had 'totally changed the look' of stop-motion films by insisting the puppets in that movie have real animal fibers, even though they were hard to control and could move between shots, creating a screen effect known as 'boiling,' where the puppet's fur appears to be constantly moving. Gent and his fellow puppet makers would 'slave over the tiniest whisker' to ensure the figures looked exactly as Anderson wanted, he said, though he added that the director gave his craftspeople freedom, despite his reputation for perfectionism. While making 'Isle of Dogs,' for instance, Gent recalled that Anderson's opening instruction was simple: 'Sculpt some dogs!' So, Gent and his team spent months making hundreds of mongrels, with Anderson choosing bits he liked from individual models and asking the puppet makers to bring them together. 'It was amazing fun,' Gent recalled. At the opening of the Paris exhibition on Monday, one item drew more attention than any other: the model of the Grand Budapest Hotel. Before giving a brief speech, Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this article, posed in front of its pink walls for photos, including with a French pop star in a cutesy outfit, like a character in an Anderson movie. Simon Weisse, who oversaw the making of the prop, said that six craftspeople spent three months building the model, which includes glass windows and sheer curtains. The color choice, though, was all Anderson's, he said. Weisse said that when the color samples had first arrived at the studio, he couldn't believe it. 'I said, 'Pink? Bright pink and dark pink? No!'' he recalled. 'I asked the art department to check there wasn't a mistake, but they said, 'It's right. Wes has chosen these colors.'' It was only when Weisse finished the job, he said, that he appreciated Anderson's decision. The colors were quirky, but they echoed real central European buildings, and fitted perfectly with the movie's eccentricities. Anderson might sweat the smallest details, Weisse said, but 'in the end, he's always right.'
New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Theater Company's Lost French New Wave Film Gets Its New York Premiere
The French film industry was hardly the only force spurring the barricades, Molotov cocktails and worker strikes that were synonymous with Paris in May 1968. But the French government's attempt to fire the head of the Cinémathèque Française earlier that year supplied crucial kindling. And while the Cannes Film Festival managed to open amid the unrest, with a glittery restoration of 'Gone With the Wind,' Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were among those who helped scuttle the festival at the halfway point. This is the environment in which Lee Breuer and other ambitious New York theater artists found themselves dubbing French films into English for the Hong Kong market. They were also absorbing lessons in elliptical, pugnacious, visually striking theater from the likes of the Berliner Ensemble and the Living Theater, a group of New Yorkers living in voluntary exile in Europe. By 1970, Breuer had returned to New York and formed Mabou Mines, the influential Off Off Broadway theater troupe. (The other founding members included fellow dubbers Ruth Maleczech and David Warrilow, as well as JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass.) But first the Paris-based gang set out to produce a silent film, called 'Moi-même,' about a 13-year-old boy who tries to create a film collective through begging, hustling and sometimes armed robbery. They wrote some provisional lines of dialogue on a few envelopes and grabbed cameras, bankrolled by the man who owned the dubbing studio. They began shooting just as the protests were winding down — and then their unfinished project ground to its own halt. Now, over 50 years later, 'Moi-même' will finally make its New York debut at L'Alliance New York on Thursday, co-directed and co-written by Breuer and his son Mojo Lorwin, who wasn't born until 1984. Additional screenings are scheduled for next month at Yale University Film Archives (April 24) and as part of a film festival in Athens, Ohio. 'We all knew the basic contours of the story from sitting around and talking to Lee, and the assumption throughout was that we were going to dub it and have a script when we got finished with the shoot,' said Kevin Mathewson, who was 13 when he played the film's central role. (His parents were academics who had befriended met Breuer and Maleczech at a Christmas party.) 'We just never got around to that.' The 'Moi-même' footage resurfaced in 2009 after Breuer had returned to Paris to film a production of one of Mabou Mines's most famous works, 'Dollhouse.' A few years later, his son became involved and had more modest ambitions. 'I thought I might put together a little montage of the footage for Mabou's 50th anniversary,' Lorwin said. 'I really looked at it for the first time, and that's when I realized there could be a feature there.' Although Breuer was in poor health by the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he and his son discussed the project via Zoom. 'There was this beautiful footage and a bare-bones plot, but not much else,' said Lorwin, who also had a notebook from the time in which Breuer devoted some 30 pages to snippets of dialogue and ideas for scenes. 'Lee remembered a lot of names and gave me the skeleton of the plot,' Lorwin said. 'But it wasn't until after he died in 2021 that I really tried to channel him and figure out what he had tried to do.' Then began the painstaking process of creating a script and the accompanying soundtrack for the 65-minute 'Moi-même,' essentially a French New Wave film reconstructed in hindsight. In several cases, the new dialogue is spoken by children of the original cast members. The L'Alliance film curator Jake Perlin, who called the original footage 'an enthusiasm in search of a film,' described May 1968 as a major moment in film history as well as political history. 'For anyone who's interested in French New Wave cinema moving into post-New Wave, 1968 is the pivotal event,' Perlin said. 'Godard is on the barricades, but so is Philippe Garrel,' another French film director, 'who was 20 at the time. And the fact that a bunch of New Yorkers were running around capturing this on film — I was all over that.' And when Godard wasn't on the barricades or at Cannes in 1968, he also managed to make a cameo in 'Moi-même.' 'He just showed up one day,' said Mathewson, who is traveling from Brazil to see his 13-year-old self at the L'Alliance screening. 'He stood there laughing at the production, and then he walked through.' Lorwin pointed out that many of Breuer's early scripts use film metaphors, particularly the Beckettian early works that helped cement Mabou Mines's reputation. But he never fully understood what his father meant by them until he saw the raw 'Moi-même' footage in 2020 and gained new appreciation for what Breuer was attempting to do. 'Lee had this incredible theater career,' he said, 'but he was always talking about making a movie. I feel like this was maybe the one that got away.'
