I first saw Maria Schneider in The Passenger, which Seymour Chatman screened in the Antonioni course I took as a freshman at UC Berkeley. We’d already watched the director’s 11 previous dramatic features by the time we got to it. Ambient despair—for which Monica Vitti was a kind of repository in Antonioni’s films of the ’60s—was still present in this 1975 film, but the woman, this time, wasn’t its repository. Antonioni was doing something new, using a female character as an agent of irony, pleasure, and freedom. Schneider, with her magical tomboy aura as the unnamed “Girl,” struck me as youth personified not as innocence or ignorance or fetish, but the witness to broken adulthood. “What are you running away from?” she asks Jack Nicholson as they drive. “Turn your back to the front seat,” he tells her, in the famous scene as they ride along in a convertible. She does, and surveys, arms held wide, the countryside as it recedes behind them. The camera stays on her face, first joyous, then subdued, as she enters the future facing the past. 

And I perhaps did the same by seeing Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, which came first, in 1972, after The Passenger. Schneider plays a similar role in each, as a companion to misery, but in Last Tango her character is marked by that misery, and so was the actress, whose performance plunged her into infamy. That The Passenger was the film Maria wished people would attach to her instead of Tango was expected as I read My Cousin Maria Schneider, published this past April by Scribner, translated by the actor Molly Ringwald. What surprised me about the book was how nimbly it became a story about a girl—its author, Vanessa Schneider, Maria’s younger cousin by 17 years—and her own excitement, sadness, guilt, and fear at having a larger-than-life parentless relative who came and went, and for long stretches was lost to addiction. The big girl, unprepared for fame, and deeply damaged by Brando and Bertolucci, goes out into the wilds of heroin, comes back covered in holes, nods out, buys a shiny blue moped, gets it stolen a day after she buys it (she’s left the keys in it), throws a fit, and then forgets all about it. The little girl shudders at the holes in her cousin’s body, mourns the loss of the beautiful blue moped. It is the job of some to live, and of others to absorb and reflect. “I’m someone who puts life first, it’s the only way you can save yourself,” Maria had said on French TV, in an interview, which, last year, was meticulously restaged and reinterpreted by three actresses in a short film by Elisabeth Subrin, Maria Schneider, 1983.

The little girl, now a journalist for Le Monde, has built a story that intermixes her own memories with the myths and realities of her purported subject, the famous cousin. The narrative largely takes place over the 1970s, in scenes of men with long beards and women in tribal jewelry, her father’s Maoism deflating into the election of François Mitterrand in 1981 and a centrist status quo, after which revolution is never again mentioned at the Schneider home. In 1978, Maria, age 26, had been treated as a casualty of radicalism by Paris Match, “there to remind readers that everything must be paid for eventually.” Maria embodied a kind of libertine, druggie cool, but was actually a right-winger, as we learn in this illuminating book. In 1968, during the student protests, she even marched down the Champs-Élysées in support of de Gaulle and against the leftists. Later, she supported Jacques Chirac. If French history is full of troubling reactionaries who made daring art, one might also chalk up Maria’s contradictions to the notion that a true rebel fits no box, and instead, says and does mostly what she’s not supposed to. 

Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, will be published next September (2024).