Festival

From the Journals of Jean Seberg

 (Docu -- Color/B&W -- 16mm)

By DAVID ROONEY

A Couch Potato production. Directed, written, edited by Mark Rappaport.
 
Jean Seberg - Mary Beth Hurt
 

Following his 1992 feature "Rock Hudson's Home Movies," which humorously dissected the late actor's screen career to chart the gulf between his public and private personae, Mark Rappaport takes an equally idiosyncratic approach to the docu biography in "From the Journals of Jean Seberg." The director's arc here, however, is considerably wider, examining the actress's life through her movies and playfully ricocheting off to ponder diverse aspects of celebrity, film history and perceptions of women in the movies. Specialized theatrical release should reap solid results.

Rappaport's deconstruction of life and career of the Midwestern girl who was a Hollywood has-been at 19, a nouvelle vague icon at 21 and a suicide at 40 is undertaken here by Seberg herself, as played by Mary Beth Hurt.

Beginning with Seberg's widely publicized discovery in a nationwide talent search by Otto Preminger, Hurt talks the audience through an extensive series of clips and photographs from Seberg's Hollywood and Euro careers, ironically assessing her lucky breaks and crippling misfortunes.

What sets the docu apart from more clinical celebrity studies is its enormously entertaining willingness to digress. By constantly backtracking and fast-forwarding, Rappaport is able to join the dots between the various highs and lows of Seberg's history, both onscreen and off, inventively establishing connecting lines between her career and that of other stars with an audacious license that swings from jokey juxtaposition to strange-but-true coincidence to something approaching conspiracy theorizing.

Not surprisingly, docu has a serious ax to grind against Preminger, who directed the 17-year-old, woefully miscast Seberg with dictatorial sadism in "Saint Joan."

Hurt relates the humiliating ordeal, amusingly weighing up other casting choices, from Jane Fonda to Vanessa Redgrave to Barbra Streisand, reportedly tested by Preminger for the role. In one of many very funny montage gags, the latter limns a Jewish Joan of Arc, singing "People" atop a burning pyre.

After the film's resounding failure, Preminger tried again to catapult his discovery to star status with "Bonjour Tristesse." But this film also died, and despite her seven-year contract with the director, Seberg was unceremoniously dumped.

But pic influenced critic Jean-Luc Godard, who cast Seberg in his first feature, "Breathless," in which she became perhaps the first modern movie star, propelling women all over France to the hairdresser to crop their coifs a la Seberg.

Substantial consideration is given to Seberg's role as a schizophrenic in Robert Rossen's "Lilith," probably her best part in a Hollywood picture. The film's failure was her biggest disappointment.

During the late '60s and early '70s, Seberg's involvement with the Black Panther movement made her a target of FBI surveillance and media hounding. In examining the effect this had on her career, Rappaport places her alongside Fonda and Redgrave.

Redgrave and, in particular, Fonda are also the subject of a sideline on actresses starring in their husbands' films, with Seberg becoming part of the club after marrying Gallic writer-director Romain Gary. Hurt describes the couple as "a low-rent version of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in French and English subtitles," going on to observe Gary's screen portrayal of Seberg as a half-mad nymphomaniac and, later, his mocking of her political commitment via femme characters clearly based on her.

Amusing parallels are drawn to Roger Vadim's kittenizing of Fonda as space bimbo "Barbarella," sequences from which are hilariously intercut with one of her workout tapes. The actress also cops heavy flak for her decision in the 1980 s to publicly apologize for her "Hanoi Jane" period.

The last-ditch attempt to make Seberg a Hollywood commodity was "Paint Your Wagon." During shooting she became involved with co-star Clint Eastwood, an affair that added to her emotional scars. The Eastwood screen phenomenon also comes under the magnifying glass, with a fanciful line traced from Russian formalism of the silent period (Gary's father was a Soviet film star of the time) through the French New Wave to the Man With No Name.

Bedeviled by drugs and alcohol, listed by the FBI as a sex pervert and vilified in the press, Seberg suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and lost the child she was carrying. In relating this episode, Hurt makes her sole, emotionally choked departure from a dryly professorial tone that's appealingly laced with self-deprecating humor.

After their split, Gary continued to make her the subject of his work, most notably in the Costa-Gavras pic "Clair de Femme," based on Gary's novel, in which Romy Schneider's character is a suicidal, thinly veiled depiction of Seberg. The docu supposes she killed herself the same night she saw the film.

Shot and edited on video and blown up to 16mm, the film suffers mildly in terms of image quality. Sound also is often less than crystal-clear. The wit and invention of Rappaport's script more than compensate for this, however, and the tireless stream of wry observations and judiciously chosen, sharply edited clips makes this a singularly stimulating entry in the doomed-star canon.

Camera (color/B&W, 16mm), Mark Daniels; costume design, Janet Cassady; sound, Tony Volonte; associate producer, Coleen Fitzgibbon. Reviewed at Locarno Film Festival (Cinema/cinemas), Aug. 9, 1995. Running time: 97 MIN.