Before the mendacious biopic SEBERG and excellent documentary JEAN SEBERG: ACTRESS ACTIVIST ICON, independant film-maker Mark Rappaport made Jean his second meditation on cinema: FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG.
Casting Mary Beth Hurt is a master-stroke: facially similar, Hurt is also from Marshalltown, Iowa and actually had teenage Jean as a baby-sitter when small.
Through Rappaport's sly use of montage, Jean reflects on how she was exploited by Otto Preminger's humiliating treatment on the sets of SAINT JOAN and BONJOUR TRISTESSE and the bizarre way her second husband Romain Gary cast her in two films as a nymphomaniacal victim.
Through this, Rappaport addresses how male directors cast their actress partners as prostitutes or nymphos and how Hollywood morality influenced female characters' sexualty.
The most successful sequence connects the lives and careers of Jean with fellow actress activists Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda - and why they "survived".
Shelf or charity shop? Def Shelf. Rappaport's theories might be a bit of a stretch at times - get this: Jean was married to Romain Gary who asserted that he was the illegitimate son of Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine whose close-up from a silent film was used by film director/theorist Lev Kuleshov to prove how the viewer projects the emotion onto a scene - he intercut Mosjoukine's blank expression between shots of a dead woman, a child playing and food and his original viewers claimed the actor's expression changed every time - so by inter-cutting Jean's blank expression from A BOUT DE SOUFFLE's final scene, he links Jean to Russian revolutionary film-making... yeah right. However at the film's climax thankfully he drops the tricks and allows us to focus on Mary Beth Hurt's emotional recounting of the FBI's 1970 campaign to discredit her and her subsequent miscarriage. Although the film allows for humour and sarcastic takes on Hollywood, ultimately Rappaport's film leaves you sad for Jean, as it should do.
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