Critics reviews

“Being Maria” doesn’t do a particularly good job of giving Schneider her due. In fact, for a movie ostensibly about showing the world she was more than just the girl from “Last Tango In Paris,” it spends a disproportionate amount of time on that period of her life, with that single project taking up roughly half of the film’s runtime.

Flawed but fascinating... Despite a clunky air of earnestness and some soap opera-like scenes, plus the overly familiar arc of a celebrity spiraling out of control, the film resonates because the central topic is so of the moment.

Much of [the film's] success rests on how Palud recreates the butter scene, and she does so superbly, as do Anamaria Vartolomei and Matt Dillon... In reframing the incident that defined Schneider’s life, Palud has helped give the actress, who died in 2011, a more dignified epilogue.

Being Maria’ is not so much a standard-procedure biopic which tracks a life from beginning to end in a linear fashion, but a deliberate focus on the before-during-after of the film which would change Schneider’s life, very much for the worse.

After the furore of that pivotal scene, which happens early on, the film has nothing more to say and unravels as does Maria’s life.

Palud’s film is both rewarding and frustrating: a tight, morally scorching opening followed by a much flatter, simpler account of its aftermath that can’t help but play as an hour-long postscript.

Palud’s second feature may be uneven, but it hits on something fundamental about its troubled, defiant subject... As Schneider struggles toward personal stability, Being Maria occasionally stumbles, the character’s descent into drugs fairly pro forma for a rise-then-fall biopic. Even during the film’s weakest passages, though, Vartolomei’s layered turn keeps this story emotionally honest.

The familiar kind of biopic moments outside of the sequences about the making and aftermath of Last Tango put all this squarely in the Lifetime TV Movie of the Week formula, and it just doesn’t have the uniqueness to match those scenes. Fortunately, it is all lifted tremendously by its talented and intriguing star, Vartolomei.

[Being Maria] is built entirely around that pivotal [on set] incident, both for better and for worse. Like the actress herself... the movie loses its way after the scandal surrounding Bertolucci’s film fizzles out.

A rather stripped down biopic, we witness the promise and the pain and that both didn’t define [the actress]—it merely showcased that the coping mechanisms and resilience that she possessed. Maria would have been proud of Being Maria.