Among the dozens of people who vie for social media’s controversy crown, the first week of December belonged hands down to Bernardo Bertolucci. That was the time an old video of the acclaimed Italian film-maker suddenly resurfaced online; one where he admitted that he had kept his Last Tango In Paris actress Maria Schneider in the dark about certain details of a nasty rape scene to be filmed on her. “I wanted the reaction of a girl, not an actress; she had to feel, not act, humiliated,” Bertolucci told the interviewer with amazing aplomb.
The miasma of controversy over the scene, known as the “butter scene’, is not new. Schneider, a mere 19 to leading man Marlon Brando’s 48 when she made the film in 1972, had often spoken about it in interviews — how she was told about the brutal scene just before filming and could do nothing about it, how Bertolucci and Brando planned the butter bit together without her knowledge to elicit a certain “authenticity” on screen, how she felt “a little raped by both” and how the tears of shock and mortification she shed on screen were real ones. For the record, Last Tango sent Schneider into a downward spiral of drugs and depression and though she made many films after that, her personal life was more or less in a shambles till her early death at 58.
Power play on the sets
There are several intertwined strands that bear thinking about in this grisly episode. The obvious one is, of course, unscrupulous directors’ misuse of their power over actors, mostly female actors, on a film set. Even within this paradigm different shades lurk — while Bertolucci’s manipulation of Schneider was supposedly ‘for art’s sake’, another great director Alfred Hitchcock’s mistreatment of his Birds heroine Tippi Hedren belonged to the realm of purely personal agenda. Obsessed by the beautiful actress and angered when she refused to respond to his advances, Hitchcock had real birds attack her in the climax of the film instead of the automated ones he had promised. Hedren has claimed that he even went on to destroy her career.
The Bertolucci scandal sets one thinking about Bollywood where, in the past, there have been whispers about similar misconduct on the part of male actors. Scenes requiring intimacy with an actress often provided the perfect chance for a spot of devious opportunism; directors would either be in on the nudge-nudge wink-wink game or would ignore the actors’ shenanigans in the interest of their film. The actresses in question, needless to say, were too low down in the pecking order for them to do anything other than swallow their humiliation and move on; especially since such transgressions back then were merely grist for the scandal rag mill, not crimes against which legal redressal could be sought.
As I remember from film magazines then, the occasional abusive actor who was actually questioned about his misconduct would be brazen. A fat, slightly sleazy old-time villain, now dead, had arrogantly declared that when he was in front of the camera, only the performance mattered. “If I’m doing a rape scene with someone, I might bloody well rape her,” was his nauseating statement, after which he went on to add that if the actress in question was such a “Sati Savitri”, she should stay out of films. Another notorious instance of alleged misbehavior concerned a superstar, now deceased, who taunted a very young newcomer with obscene remarks (and perhaps more) during a bedroom scene while the director smirked. When the girl and her mother, in a rare show of courage, approached magazines and brought their behaviour to light, the young actress’s career was stalled forever.
Masterclass in exploitation
An inkling of what might sometimes happen during the filming of intimate or rape scenes (I’m guessing only to small-fry actresses) becomes clear in a certain ’90s blockbuster. A couple of months ago, I rewound to this film for a spot of fact-checking for a column, and was horrified by what I saw — a prolonged sexual assault sequence in which a newbie actress was manhandled by four men in the crudest manner possible. Her expressions and struggle to free herself told their own story, which was clearly not in the script. Inexplicably passed by the censors, the sequence hints at the possibility of similar footage shot for other films; footage that never reached the screen, thereby concealing other dark tales of exploitation. A post-script: though the starlet had an ‘Introducing’ credit line in the film, her career seems to have ended with it — she surfaced as a junior artiste in a crossover movie eight years later but that was it.
What the actress went through — or one assumes she went through — was quite unambiguously sexual harassment at the workplace. Disturbingly, however, this is an issue that can get clouded when it comes to the acting profession. In examples of the Bertolucci kind, where the director is an acknowledged ‘creative genius’, his methods prioritising creativity/authenticity over a woman’s rights are accepted and even endorsed – a friend who shared the story of Schneider’s betrayal on her Facebook page got a one-word response, ‘Masterclass!’, from an evidently awed gent. In India, there’s an overarching moral angle brought in, epitomised by the Sati Savitri remark from the aforementioned villain: namely, if Schneider was okay with doing a sexually explicit film and the Bollywood starlet was willing to enact a gang rape scene, they had no business complaining. This is the good old patriarchy speaking — where choice doesn’t exist for women who overstep society’s Laxman rekha, and men consequently have the license to do what they want with them.
Decades after Last Tango In Paris and other examples mentioned here, attitudes and practices are supposedly more professional than what they used to be (though Bertolucci in a recent interview still maintained that he feels “guilt but not regret” about his treatment of his actress). Legal redress, the lack of which victims like Schneider and Tippi Hedren rued was unavailable in their days, is today more accessible, even in India. I wonder, though, whether victims take recourse to this; or whether the Indian film industry even has committees looking into complaints of workplace sexual harassment as mandated by the Supreme Court.
An online feminist magazine, writing about the Last Tango controversy, had a sarcastic suggestion: that movies should include a disclaimer saying ‘No women were harmed during the making of this film’. That’s a brilliant line. And, going by the record of abuse, viciously torched careers and impacted personal lives in film industries, closer to the truth than one would want to believe.
The columnist is a freelance writer and editor
