You know what disturbed me about that Bernardo Bertolucci story yesterday? How many people were full-on raging about the use of the word “rape.” Semantic parsing isn’t a good look, especially when the discussion involved an actress (Maria Schneider) who explicitly said she felt like she had been raped, not to mention the discussion of Bertolucci admitting in 2013 that he colluded with Marlon Brando to assault Schneider, who was only 19 years old at the time. For whatever record, rape is defined as the “unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim.” What happened to Schneider constituted rape. She felt like she was raped. Bertolucci admits that they did not get her consent for certain parts of the scene.

But now that Bertolucci’s 2013 comments have gone viral, he wants to correct the record once again, lest his entire filmography be tainted by a crime he clearly admitted to just a few years ago. He issued a statement yesterday in his native tongue (Italian), and the statement was translated by Variety. Here you go:

“I would like, for the last time, to clear up a ridiculous misunderstanding that continues to generate press reports about ‘Last Tango in Paris’ around the world. Several years ago at the Cinemathèque Francaise someone asked me for details on the famous ‘butter scene.’ I specified, but perhaps I was not clear, that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would have used butter. We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies. Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false! Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter. And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay.”

[From Variety]

Again, the semantic parsing does no one any good. A teenage actress thought she was going to be filming an already violent and emotionally wrought scene, and then she was “surprised” by her costar and director when they made the decision to assault her with butter for a more “authentic” reaction. Again, consent is the issue. Bertolucci’s statement is basically like “we didn’t get her consent but it’s cool because it’s just butter.” It reminds me of the Stanford rape case and what the rapist’s father dismissed his son’s crime as “twenty minutes of action.” Oh, you just raped her with butter without her consent? Case closed, right?

Photos courtesy of WENN.