Few movies have spent as long in the middle of a cultural argument as Last Tango in Paris. Pauline Kael compared its New York premiere to the opening of The Rite of Spring, while Italian authorities went so far as to order copies destroyed in the 1970s. As recently as 2024, a screening at the Cinémathèque française was cancelled after protests. The reasons people fought over the film in 1972 and the reasons they question it today aren’t identical, but the controversy has become inseparable from the work itself.

Paul (Marlon Brando, The Godfather) is an American living in Paris and struggling after his wife’s suicide. He encounters Jeanne (Maria Schneider, The Passenger) while both are looking at the same empty apartment, and the two begin a sexual relationship almost immediately. Paul dictates the rules: no names, no pasts, and nothing about their lives beyond those walls. Jeanne, meanwhile, is engaged to Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud, The 400 Blows), an enthusiastic young filmmaker who seems determined to turn everything around him into a movie. Bertolucci builds a story about grief, power, desire, and the ways anonymity can become another form of control.

The director developed the premise from a fantasy about encountering a stranger without exchanging identities. Working with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, he shaped the look around the warm oranges and flesh tones of Francis Bacon’s paintings, two of which appear during the opening credits. Brando famously relied on cue cards for some of the dialogue, but the performance still feels startlingly exposed. His work earned an Oscar nomination and remains one of the film’s most compelling features, with a rawness that Martin Scorsese has compared to On the Waterfront.

That artistic achievement cannot be separated from what Schneider later described about making the film. She said that Bertolucci and Brando withheld details of how the notorious simulated sexual-assault scene would be staged, leaving her feeling violated and humiliated. Bertolucci later acknowledged withholding an element of the scene to obtain a genuine reaction. No retrospective assessment should minimize what that decision meant for the young actress at the center of it. Feminist critics had already challenged the film’s overwhelming alignment with Paul’s perspective; Schneider’s account makes those objections harder to dismiss. Brando’s performance may command attention, but Schneider’s experience changes the conversation.

The film’s landmark status, Storaro’s beautiful photography, and Gato Barbieri’s Grammy-winning music remain worth discussing. So does the way Bertolucci’s methods helped produce an image that many viewers now find impossible to watch without thinking of the performer who was denied meaningful advance knowledge of it. Last Tango in Paris is significant, but significance is not the same as an obligation to admire it without question. The 2024 drama Being Maria offers another perspective on Schneider’s life and career.