Starring: Kristen Stewart, Anthony Mackie, Yvan Attal, Jack O’Connell, Carl Kowalski, Gabriel Sky, Colm Meaney
Distributor: Icon Films
Runtime: 103 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2020
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This American political drama is inspired by real events, and tells the story of ill-fated American actress, Jean Seberg, in the 1960s. Seberg was targeted by the FBI when she romantically and politically became involved with a well-known civil-rights activist in the USA.
Seberg was born in Iowa in 1938 and died in Paris in 1979. The film is drawn from a screenplay written for the movie by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse. “Time” magazine listed Kristen Stewart’s acting in the film as one of the ten best performances of 2019.
The real Jean Seberg was an iconic actress of French cinema and starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (1960) which defined the impact of French New Wave cinema. Two decades later, she was found dead in her automobile – a suspected suicide, after a previous suicide attempt. The film is directed by Australian theatre director, Benedict Andrews.
In the late 1960s, Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) was hounded by the FBI because of her political and romantic involvement with civil rights activist, Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie). The surveillance began when Seberg stepped off a plane from Paris, where she lived with her second husband, Romain Gary (Yvan Attal). She met Hakim Jamal on the plane, and after landing in Los Angeles she joined him in giving the Black Power salute at Los Angeles airport. The FBI was watching, and Seberg was subsequently targeted for her support of civil rights causes, which included the radical action group, the Black Panthers. Seberg had a history of making substantial, financial contributions to civil rights groups. At the time of the airport incident, Jamal was married to a cousin of Malcolm X, and Seberg was immediately blacklisted by Hollywood for giving the Black Panther salute.
In its effort to discredit Seberg, the FBI’s surveillance of her eventually destroyed her career, and the agency’s scrutiny of her pushed her to breaking point. Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) was sympathetic to Seberg’s plight, and on FBI orders was an uncomfortable party to spreading false stories about Seberg to the media. Other agents in the FBI, such as Vince Vaughan (Carl Kowalski) stalked Seberg and intimidated her, to the point of inducing a paranoid psychotic break. The film shows O’Connell beginning to despise himself and trying to warn Seberg, but the agency’s surveillance of Seberg continued. Incorrect stories about Seberg cheapened the public’s image of her, and her affair with Jamal, who was married, stirred up Hollywood.
The central role of Seberg is very impressively acted by Kristen Stewart, who captures well the nervousness and essential vulnerability of a young actress. Seberg respected the rights of others, even when her own rights were being violated. Acting nervously, Stewart delivers a very impressive acting performance, and she identifies realistically with the character she is playing,
The film is stylishly produced and matches its mood with clever cinematography, and a very good musical soundtrack. However, there are several distractions from the main game. Fictional characters, are introduced, for example, that represent plot contrivances that seem unnecessary.
The movie is an intelligent, compelling example of people who had their lives shattered by J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program, “Cointelpro”, which targeted anyone whom the FBI on its own criteria regarded as subversive. Jean Seberg was not brought down by her own fragility and unreliability, but by an agency bent on destroying her for holding particular political beliefs.
This is a film that explores the tragedy of a maligned actress. The threads of Seberg’s life that characterise the film’s plot-line thoughtfully convey the tragedy and stress associated with a young, talented actress, who was once the darling of French New Wave Cinema.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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