The importance of Jean Seberg
In a new film about the persecuted actress, Kristen Stewart was the director’s only choice to embrace the Breathless star’s essence, writes Stephanie Bunbury.
Most people remember Jean Seberg as the 1960s gamine with a daringly short pixie crop selling The Herald Tribune in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s gamechanging 1960 film about a gangster’s affair with a naive American tourist.
That was pretty much all Kristen Stewart knew about her, she admits, before she was sent the script for Seberg. It was then that she learnt that Seberg was an activist – most prominently, a supporter of the Black Panthers – who was pursued, persecuted, and her career demolished in covert operations by the FBI.
‘‘Figuring out what her actual story was, I was baffled by the fact it wasn’t more commonly known,’’ Stewart says.
‘‘But I don’t think my view of her was reductive, because I wasn’t surprised by the way she led her life. You can tell when she’s in films that her eyes are open. She’s not a performative actor; she’s instinctive and very present.’’
The film begins in 1968, with the actress setting out for Los Angeles to audition for Paint Your Wagon. Paris, where Seberg lived with her second husband, Romain Gary, had erupted into revolution. In the United States, the civil rights movement was increasingly militant. Of course, someone like Seberg, infused by the spirit of the times, would nail her political colours to the mast.
Seberg’s Australian director Benedict Andrews says he thought of Stewart for the role as soon as he read Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse’s script.
‘‘From that moment, I could not imagine making the movie without her.’’
There were parallels in the two actress’ biographies that were interesting without being crucial – both had starring roles while still in their teens, and both were vilified in the US and found a new freedom in the European cinema. Whoever played Seberg had to ‘‘look like one of the icons of 20th-century cinema’’ but that in itself wasn’t so difficult. ‘‘A model can get that great haircut, all of that.’’ The crucial thing was less tangible.
‘‘Jean had a kind of radical openness, a kind of luminous quality and I didn’t want someone trying to impersonate that,’’ Andrews says. Impersonation can work in a biopic, he says, but he wasn’t after that.
‘‘I was after a kind of raw truth. I think Jean possessed that and Kristen possesses that. In different ways they have an essence that you can’t pin down.’’
He wanted Stewart to embody Seberg while remaining herself.
‘‘That’s what I think great film actors do. They’re both those things, or it’s just an impersonation. And she does both. She is Jean and Kristen simultaneously.’’
‘‘People who are compulsively artistic wear their politics naturally . . . If you’re not living in fear of your career failing, and willing to engage in the world around you, that’s political in itself.’’ Kristen Stewart
The fact that Seberg was having an affair with a Black Power leader, here called Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) was especially incendiary.
FBI agents staked out her house, bugged her bed and the phone, and called at all hours.
The central relationship in Seberg, however, is between Seberg and her unseen pursuer Jack (Jack O’Connell), a recent agency recruit who is assigned to watch her and becomes obsessed with her. She knows he is there, but nobody believes her. She is driven to the point of paranoia by this
gaslighting as much as the surveillance itself.
Andrews, whose career has been mostly in theatre, says this dual perspective is something only cinema could deliver.
‘‘I can’t do that in the theatre. And I love how that works on an emotional level, that parallel connection with the two of them. That is uniquely cinematic.’’
In a sense, he says, the whole film is about the relationship between the camera and its subject. ‘‘Jack is shooting Jean with a camera; we’re shooting Kristen with a camera. The techniques of surveillance are the same techniques as cinema. We see it used to create beautiful iconographic images like her as Jean, and we also see it used as a device of lies.’’
The film has had mixed reviews, in Cannes and since it opened in Europe – The Telegraph’s
‘‘snappy, absorbing watch’’ is Indiewire’s ‘‘mess from start to finish’’ – but critics were impressed by Stewart’s committed performance.
Stewart as Seberg is jittery, vulnerable, intelligent, well-intentioned and impulsive. As one review put it, she plays with fire, including blazes of her own making.
‘‘I think she had a sort of voracious hunger for experience, but I think more than that she was at her very core a humanitarian,’’ says Stewart.
‘‘There were interviews from people who grew up with her in Nebraska where they remember her consistently fighting for the underdog. So I think her activism started very, very early.’’
Whether actors should become poster people for political causes remains a vexed question, debated most vigorously around Oscar time when stars get their two minutes on the podium. Some believe that with fame comes the responsibility to speak out. Others think actors should just stick to acting. Stewart doesn’t think actors are obliged to take up any cause.
‘‘As soon as you start feeling imposed upon, if you feel people are pulling things out of you, it’s contrived. Nobody’s entitled to your opinion.’’ These days, she is comfortable with staying quiet, if she has nothing specific to say.
‘‘I feel like it’s very clear where I stand. I think it would be really shocking to hear I was a staunch Republican. That would be like a super shocker.’’
People can also elect to be entertainers, she says. ‘‘You don’t have to be someone who represents your ideas. There is an escapism that is gorgeous and you can be part of that, for sure.’’
On the other hand, she says, anyone who identifies as an artist is intrinsically political.
‘‘There is no way for your art not to reflect the way you view the world you live in. People who are compulsively artistic wear their politics naturally. Without even knowing they are making statements, they are doing it inadvertently. If you’re not living in fear of your career failing, and willing to engage in the world around you, that’s political in itself.’’