Molly Ringwald Is Worried About Cancel Culture
- 7 months ago
Molly Ringwald Is Worried About Cancel Culture.
When Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she said no. It’s not that she wasn’t interested in the late French actor, whose life was so horribly defined and dominated by Last Tango in Paris. Nor was it that she felt too close to the industry to tackle the life story of such a tragic figure. “The opposite,” she says, speaking to me from Vancouver, where she is filming the supernatural drama series Riverdale. “I felt my experience as an actor would only bring more to the project. Because I feel like I understood her.” It was just that she originally didn’t have time. Then the pandemic hit.
At the start of our video call, her camera isn’t working. It doesn’t matter, I say: just tell me what you look like. “I don’t want to do that,” she says, drily. Then her face appears: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 as it was in the mid-80s when her career took off, but also relaxed, thoughtful, bespectacled. She looks like a film star playing an academic who was in the middle of reading something more interesting, but is patient enough to break off to talk to me for a bit.
She takes up Schneider’s story, the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film and its infamous rape scene. “She was on board for a lot of it. I feel like she personified the time [the film was released in 1972]: she was free, she was bisexual, she was really happy to be part of something that was daring. They just went the extra step that they didn’t need to go. The film could have been daring and provocative without that. She should have been able to consent.”
Schneider was 19 when they shot the film. Bertolucci didn’t tell her the plot until just before filming: that Marlon Brando’s character was going to anally rape hers. “Even though there was no actual penetration, he set up a rape, because she didn’t consent to that,” she says. “And he said: ‘That was what I wanted. I wanted the reaction of a girl, not of an actress.’ And that’s not right.”
Bertolucci’s casual denigration of Schneider – she couldn’t possibly act humiliated; he had to make sure that she was humiliated – makes it hard to take seriously any of the penitence he expressed in later years. “I think he knew he had to atone, to say something,” says Ringwald. “So he did, but if you see his different interviews, his story changes. I feel like he said what he felt he was supposed to say.”
The crowning injustice is not that Bertolucci and Brando made a fortune from the film, and Schneider very little, but that she ended up as the punchline of the piece, all the innuendo loaded on her. It eclipsed the rest of her career, in a way that it didn’t anyone else’s. “I feel like I knew Maria Schneider originally just by ‘butter’ [which Brando’s character uses as a lubricant],” she says. “As a teenager, when I thought about that film, that’s all
When Molly Ringwald was first approached to translate My Cousin Maria Schneider, by Vanessa Schneider, she said no. It’s not that she wasn’t interested in the late French actor, whose life was so horribly defined and dominated by Last Tango in Paris. Nor was it that she felt too close to the industry to tackle the life story of such a tragic figure. “The opposite,” she says, speaking to me from Vancouver, where she is filming the supernatural drama series Riverdale. “I felt my experience as an actor would only bring more to the project. Because I feel like I understood her.” It was just that she originally didn’t have time. Then the pandemic hit.
At the start of our video call, her camera isn’t working. It doesn’t matter, I say: just tell me what you look like. “I don’t want to do that,” she says, drily. Then her face appears: as camera-ready and photogenic at 55 as it was in the mid-80s when her career took off, but also relaxed, thoughtful, bespectacled. She looks like a film star playing an academic who was in the middle of reading something more interesting, but is patient enough to break off to talk to me for a bit.
She takes up Schneider’s story, the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film and its infamous rape scene. “She was on board for a lot of it. I feel like she personified the time [the film was released in 1972]: she was free, she was bisexual, she was really happy to be part of something that was daring. They just went the extra step that they didn’t need to go. The film could have been daring and provocative without that. She should have been able to consent.”
Schneider was 19 when they shot the film. Bertolucci didn’t tell her the plot until just before filming: that Marlon Brando’s character was going to anally rape hers. “Even though there was no actual penetration, he set up a rape, because she didn’t consent to that,” she says. “And he said: ‘That was what I wanted. I wanted the reaction of a girl, not of an actress.’ And that’s not right.”
Bertolucci’s casual denigration of Schneider – she couldn’t possibly act humiliated; he had to make sure that she was humiliated – makes it hard to take seriously any of the penitence he expressed in later years. “I think he knew he had to atone, to say something,” says Ringwald. “So he did, but if you see his different interviews, his story changes. I feel like he said what he felt he was supposed to say.”
The crowning injustice is not that Bertolucci and Brando made a fortune from the film, and Schneider very little, but that she ended up as the punchline of the piece, all the innuendo loaded on her. It eclipsed the rest of her career, in a way that it didn’t anyone else’s. “I feel like I knew Maria Schneider originally just by ‘butter’ [which Brando’s character uses as a lubricant],” she says. “As a teenager, when I thought about that film, that’s all