Jeanne, unhappy with her own personal life, agrees to their arrangement. Paul is adamant and refuses to talk about anything for he only wants to have sex with her and nothing else. But Jeanne (who has some knowledge of English after overhearing Paul talking to himself about his miserable life) keeps trying to find out who the strange American man is. They are to meet there twice a week only for sex and tell no one about each other. Paul lays out ground rules that they are never to reveal their names to each other and never to discuss the outside world or to talk about their pasts.

The next day, Paul and Jeanne rendezvous back at the vacant apartment. Paul doesn't say much and goes to his room to be by himself. The maid speaks to Paul about the fact his French wife, Rose, two days earlier committed suicide in the bathtub by slashing her wrists. Meanwhile, the middle-aged American man, who is named Paul, returns to a flophouse hotel in a run-down part of the city where he ventures to his apartment and watches a maid wash blood off the bathtub and surrounding walls. Despite their genuine loving engagement to be married, Jeanne is unhappy and annoyed that Tom insists on doing a cinéma vérité documentary all about her life and of her father, who is a well-known war hero. They walk back to Jeanne's apartment where she currently lives with her mother having taken care of her since her father, a soldier in the French Foreign Legion, was killed in action in 1958 in Algeria. Jeanne goes to the Paris Metro train station to meet her fiancée Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young television documentarian who has just returned to Paris following an assignment.

When it is over, they each go their separate ways. They are very passionate yet never introduce themselves. After a few minutes of silence and some quiet dialogue, he picks her up, backs her against a wall, rips off her panties and has sex with her in the deserted apartment. Jeanne quickly identifies him as an American because of his thick accent while they are communicating in French. There, she runs into a middle-aged, obviously depressed man (Marlon Brando) who is also looking at it. She goes alone to look at an apartment in a region of the Left Bank. Thankfully, there was just one take.' Bertolucci later insisted that the incident was misconstrued, and that only the lurid detail of butter in the scene was unscripted for shock, while the rape scene itself was scripted (and simulated).Jeanne (Maria Schneider) is a 20-year-old Parisian woman wondering the streets looking for an apartment to live for herself and her fiancée. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologize. Schneider told the Huffington Post 'Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears.' She felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. I wanted her to react humiliated.' The director's admission caused public outcry. He said he didn't tell Schneider that Brando's character would use butter as a lubricant in the film's rape scene 'because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress. Bertolucci confirmed that during a press tour. According to Maria Schneider, the infamous 'butter scene' was never in the script and it was improvised at the last minute by Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci, without consulting her.

Last tango in paris butter scene