BREATHLESSLY PAYING HOMAGE
Kristen Stewart channels doomed ’60s star Jean Seberg
VENICE, Italy — “Seberg” has already won raves for Kristen Stewart’s complex portrait of doomed ’60s movie star Jean Seberg. Winning an open casting call over 18,000 other hopefuls, Jean Seberg was an Iowa teenager with no acting experience when she was “discovered” and touted as an overnight star playing the French martyr in 1957’s “Saint Joan” — except the film flopped and the critics were cruel.
Four years later, they were proved wrong when Seberg triumphed in the now-classic “Breathless,” the first international French New Wave hit. She became a sensation with her gamine looks, innate style and charmingly American-accented French.
Seberg played the title role in Otto Preminger’s film “Saint Joan.” Seberg would star in Hollywood pictures opposite Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood but it was Paris she called home.
“Seberg” the movie begins in the late ’60s when, because of her support for the Black Panthers, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover deliberately and systematically strove to destroy her reputation and consequently any political effectiveness. (The FBI program was later exposed and condemned as illegal.)
Pregnant, Seberg gave birth prematurely to a child who died two days later; she was driven to a breakdown. In 1979, she was discovered in her parked car on a Paris street, 10 days after she had been reported missing, dead of an overdose. She was 40.
Said Stewart, 29, “I knew her from ‘Breathless,’ I knew her as this sort of image and now we’re dismantling that and seeing the unraveling of a woman within that.
“For all the reasons that she put herself there, it’s is just such a cool story to watch, right now. I know people say, ‘Why is this an important story right now?’
“Because it is. To sacrifice something that you really love, and do it for other people, is a really admirable and cool and courageous thing.
“This person’s story is tragic for all the right reasons. We should definitely know her for more than the short haircut and the movies.”
Like Jean Seberg, Stewart too found a career boost from French filmmakers. She is the only American actress to be given a Cesar — France’s Oscar — for her Frenchspeaking “Clouds of Sils Maria.”
“That she found her very welcome home in France makes total sense,” Stewart said of Seberg. “There’s more a confronting, risktaking thing they’ve got going on that I really identified with. I’m lucky to have met like-minded people.”