Jean Seberg (1938-79) began her career playing a martyr and ended it being one.
She was barely out of high school when she was plucked from Marshalltown, Iowa, and cast as the lead in Otto Preminger’s “Saint Joan” (1957). The movie was a catastrophe. Fleeing Hollywood, Seberg became the poster girl for the French new wave in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 “Breathless,” was exploited by her imperious husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, then, hounded to the brink of madness by the F.B.I. for her public support of the Black Panthers, she died at age 40, in an apparent suicide.
Ever since, the actress has been something of an artist’s muse. “Seberg,” the new Kristen Stewart vehicle, isn’t the first work to recount Seberg’s travails. Margia Kramer used her F.B.I. files as the basis for a 1981 video installation at the Museum of Modern Art; the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes took Seberg as the subject of a roman à clef, and the independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport made the most meta of biopics in his 1996 work, “From the Journals of Jean Seberg.”
Rappaport might be considered the original “VCRchaeologist,” using clips from old movies as a form of critical analysis. Following his 1992 experimental documentary, “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” “From the Journals” offers a mock subjective account of Seberg’s film career, blending onscreen performance with imagined autobiography and a soupçon of film theory. Mary Beth Hurt — a native of Marshalltown for whom the teenage Seberg actually babysat — stands in as the actress, annotating her movies from beyond the grave. “Who on earth would follow this drum majorette into battle?” she asks after watching a 17-year-old Seberg, brandishing a sword.
The voice is Hurt’s. The amused, snarky tone — Seberg refers to her torturous marriage to Gary as “a low rent version of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller” — belongs to Rappaport. Still, words can barely describe the humiliation Seberg suffered while playing her husband’s debased caricature in his exploitative feature “Birds in Peru” (1968), or the injuries, physical as well as psychological, she sustained filming “Saint Joan.”
Rappaport maintains that “the major and most interesting part of film history is gossip,” something he is pleased to deliver. But “From the Journals” is also an educated account of Seberg’s rise and fall, putting her in the context of two contemporary actresses — Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, also excoriated for their outspoken politics — as well as an entertaining illustrated lecture on film theory.
For Rappaport, Seberg is “the first modern star.” As directed by Godard in “Breathless,” she not only plays herself but openly returns the camera’s gaze. Her performance strikes Rappaport as the equivalent of an Andy Warhol “screen test,” in which a subject simply is before the camera.
Film history, for Rappaport, has its own mysterious logic. He enjoys the absurdity of Clint Eastwood’s performance opposite Seberg in the 1969 Western musical “Paint Your Wagon.” (As noted by the New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby, “they are not singers by the stretch of anybody’s imagination.”) But Rappaport relishes even more the coincidence that both actors enjoyed their first real success in Europe before their careers took vastly different trajectories. Elsewhere, the filmmaker uses Gary’s claim that he was fathered by the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine outside of marriage as a pretext to discuss the development of Soviet montage.
“Journals” is also an exercise in creative editing. The movie concludes with an Oscar-worthy homage, cutting from Seberg’s scene interviewing Jean-Pierre Melville in “Breathless” on the subject of immortality to a collage of close-ups consumed by flames and underscored by Juliette Greco’s moody rendition of the theme from Preminger’s “Bonjour Tristesse” of 1958, Seberg’s follow-up to “Saint Joan.”
“Breathless” aside, Rappaport salvages the reputations of two underappreciated movies from the wreck of Seberg’s career, “Bonjour Tristesse” and Robert Rossen’s psychological drama, “Lilith” (1964). “Bonjour Tristesse” works in part, Rappaport argues, because as a confusedly dissolute teenager vacationing in the South of France, Seberg was playing a character close to her own age and situation.
“Lilith,” a Hollywood art film which had its premiere at the 1964 New York Film Festival, gave Seberg her juiciest role, that of a bewitching patient with schizophrenia — variously taunting, seductive, witchy, and childlike — with the power to drive men mad, notably a mental hospital attendant (oafishly played by Warren Beatty) and an exceedingly nervous fellow patient (Peter Fonda).
But, even though the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther cited Seberg’s “fresh, flighty, fearsome performance,” “Lilith” flopped and afterward, the actress was confined — not to a hospital — but to a succession of hopeless parts in mediocre or embarrassing movies. (Ultimately, Lilith’s fate would be her own.) Late in her career, however, Seberg did appear in one notable avant-garde film, comparable in its way to Rappaport’s.
“Les Hautes Solitudes” is a silent and ghostly black-and-white film, “by turns alluring and alienating” as Manohla Dargis described it in her Times review. This 80-minute 1974 feature by Philippe Garrel is composed almost entirely of faces shot in close-up — mainly those of Seberg and the actress Tina Aumont, with the chanteuse Nico making a brief appearance.
Unlit, seen without makeup, Seberg might be an actress in an Ingmar Bergman film — or is she simply playing at being one? Although sometimes turning away, Seberg more often stares straight into the lens as if to support Rappaport’s claim that she is the star who need not act to connect.
“From the Journals of Jean Seberg” is available on Fandor, Kanopy and YouTube. “Bonjour Tristesse” streams on YouTube, Vudu and Google Play. “Lilith” is available on Amazon Prime Video, Vudu and other sites. “Les Hautes Solitudes” can be found on Mubi.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
