by - cgm2812 on Wed Aug 1 2007 11:28:19
Leave it to Mr. Brando to think up something like that...I guess with all that homosexual romping he did, that came from experience.
That is truly sad to know how she really feels about that scene. One could really, truly say that she was indeed raped. If what she describes is what happened, they took advantage of her naiveté and youth!
Exactly my thoughts too. I've seen the movie on DVD just two days ago and it was not my impression that the feigned sodomy scene was one of eroticism. I think it was more about Jeanne's pain, physical and emotional pain – painful anal penetration and humiliation that she was being used that way, than anything else. Jeanne in that scene was not exactly consensual and the movie didn’t give a hint that she was used to being sodomized before. She was struggling to be free and she was clearly in pain, she was in tears, crying – obviously not out of ecstasy or sexual bliss despite the butter that
Paul (Brando) – slobbered on her anus. It was
he who dragged the butter towards
himself by means of his foot while pinning down Jeanne (Schneider) in what looked like a wrestler's grip to keep her pinioned. It was
he who pulled down her pants, while
he remained fully clothed and simply groped
his penis out of his fly – as inferred in that aerial shot of the sodomy scene. Jeanne (M. Schneider) is 5’3”, age 19-20, Paul
(M. Brando) 5’10”, mid-forties, (as stated in their pages here in imdb) hefty, stocky, more or less 200 lbs in weight and with a beginning paunch.
He was doing it all with such cold deliberation and emotionless efficiency, not as it seemed to me, at least, out of erotic arousal – but out of spite, for his adulterous dead wife who he ranted against as being a pig, his mother-in-law, his wife’s lover and others (how undeniably brilliant Marlon Brando was at these kind of things) and venting it all on Jeanne, seeing how taken she was – young that she is - with his emotional intensity and the excitement of having sex with a stranger like a moth is to the candle light. (could be just as insane as Paul)
Now, there are these threads with links of interviews with the now 55-year old Schneider saying that the scene was improvised by
Brando, that the “butter” scene was
Brando’s idea, and as revealed by Schneider, with
Bertolucci’s consent and telling her about it just before the shot. Since the movie was made in the early 70’s, I am not surprised that
the two of them got away with that kind of exploitation of a beginner. And
how and why, in those days, innumerable derisive butter comments - that have become cheap - and now nonetheless derisive but has become just vapid, were then, and are now being thrown in Maria Schneider's direction.
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Truth has an inscrutable,inexorable way of seeking out and revealing Itself into the Light.
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