AFORETHOUGHT

The world is reacting in shock to Bertolucci’s revelations, but it is no surprise

THE STORY WAS hiding in plain sight for years, and may have been staple for Hollywood gossip for decades. It was even on the record. In a 2007 interview with the Daily Mail, Maria Schneider, the French actress whose career was made by her performance opposite Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, revealed that she was not informed in advance of her role in the world’s most famous sex scene. The enacted rape, popularly known as “the butter scene”, was reality cinema. To put it bluntly, it was rape. The fact that the actress was debuting on the world stage aged 19 while Brando was a superstar pushing 50 makes it look even worse.

However, the story has made international headlines only now, when a 2013 video resurfaced, in which Last Tango director Bernardo Bertolucci defended his decision to keep the scene a secret from Schneider because he had “wanted her reaction as a girl, not an actress”. Why did this admission of rape aforethought elicit a global storm of fear and loathing when the actress’s account did not? It is particularly surprising since Schneider’s interview was very newsy — it coincided with the release of a 35th anniversary edition of the film, which had first appeared in 1972. But it is Bertolucci’s video which serves as the peg for agitated round-ups of the long tradition of exploitative sex in Hollywood.

Social media may have made a difference. In 2007, Twitter was a newborn and Facebook was yet to become an alternative news channel. Viral stories did exist but they spread at subsonic speeds, giving people time to reflect. The hive mind was not as easily infected with the knee-jerk moral outrage which social media is so good at amplifying. Last Tango was sensational by design, and the revelation that it stooped to rape should not really surprise. AS WE WERE growing up, M. Balamuralikrishna was not a musician whom several senior members of the family particularly liked. Yet, he was someone with the charm of an enigma. Perhaps the ambivalence was to do with the more insidious politics of the world of classical/carnatic music that had subconsciously informed our responses. Subsequently, one developed a greater appreciation of the individuated artist that Balamuralikrishna was, the headstrong courage he had and the confidence he reposed not so much in himself as in the music that he practiced. Perhaps it was this quality that made him an impish rebel in the world of Carnatic music.

Born in a musical family, Balamuralikrishna was a child prodigy and displayed an absolute mastery over a range of instruments (he was an accomplished player on the violin) and in all the facets of concert performance associated with Carnatic music. His raga singing was soulful and imaginative, his knowledge of laya nonchalant, and his repertoire of kritis vast and his understanding of the compositions (especially those in Telugu) was deep. When he sang the Telugu kritis, the staple of Carnatic music, it was almost as if he were parsing them musically and linguistically. However, this did not immediately earn him accolades as the world of Carnatic music betrayed an orthodoxy that placed very different markers for endorsement. In some cases, it was lineage, leaving little room for auto-didacts