This is a documentary. Its subject, the actress Jean Seberg (
Breathless), recounts her life story. Only, she does so from the perspective of someone who is dead – Seberg committed suicide in 1979 – and “her” words are uttered by another actress who looks how Seberg might’ve looked, had she kept on living. They aren’t really Seberg’s words, but, rather, the documenter’s. He’s pretending that Seberg
would have spoken these words, had she spoken from beyond the grave.
The narration doesn’t sound as if it’s been mined from journal entries. It’s too meticulously planned out, too retrospective, too lecture-like. That’s how it’s supposed to sound. The unnaturalness isn’t in the narration but in the title.
“Seberg” (the narrator) shrewdly analyzes the lives and careers of other actresses of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s: Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, and, especially, Jane Fonda. These actresses made it to the top of their profession. The movie asks whether this was a victory or a degradation.
Just as the movie is concerned with an entire cohort of actresses, it also discusses the men who directed or acted with that cohort: in Seberg’s case, Otto Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard, Romain Gary (her husband), and Clint Eastwood. The men generally crafted their movies so that the male characters would seem powerful and the female characters would seem weak. Preminger and Gary were particularly ruthless in this respect.
There’s an episode of
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire,” in which a vile old man sets his daughter on fire to make a compelling TV scene. Well, this documentary shows how Otto Preminger set Jean Seberg on fire when she played Joan of Arc.
There’ve been lots of Joans of Arc, but none except Seberg was ever literally set on fire.
All the Joans were exploited, however (as one fascinating montage makes clear). All of them – Seberg, Falconetti, Bergman, and others – were shown burning at the stake because men enjoyed watching women suffer.
Watching the Joan of Arc scenes, I thought:
This is awful. What directors do to actresses – and what audiences want to see – well, it’s just inexcusable. If movies encourage people to look at women in this way, they shouldn’t be viewed.
When a manly actor such as Eastwood is photographed, the close-up evokes alertness or grit – something active. On the other hand, when the performer is a woman, the close-up evokes longing (Greta Garbo) or piety (Bergman) or, worst of all, blankness (Seberg) – that is, some form of passivity.
As this documentary explains it, actresses don’t have much control over their own performances. The director has the control. The director can edit the shots before and after a close-up to favor a certain interpretation of the actress’s state of mind.
You might wonder if the documenter, Mark Rappaport, has contempt for his subject. After all,
he puts words into “Seberg’s” mouth.
He’s the one who has “Seberg” interpret her life and those of her fellow actresses chiefly in terms of victimhood. According to the documentary, Seberg is a victim of Preminger and her other directors, of her husbands and lovers, of her audiences, of the FBI. In the end, she barely has the agency to kill herself – it takes her several tries, and while she is still alive in between those tries, her friends treat her as a breathing corpse.
Rappaport has made other movies in a quasi-documentarian style (the best known is about Rock Hudson). I haven’t seen them. But it would be useful to compare them to this one. Does he always turn his subjects into victims – the men, as well as the women?
(In this shot, the narrating “Seberg” is superimposed over footage of the real Seberg. The documentary does a lot of that sort of thing. In one scene, for instance, it glues Audrey Hepburn’s head on top of Seberg’s body. It also juxtaposes footage from different movies, and it digresses from its biographical narrative to explain certain aspects of film grammar. It certainly is educational.)
