The New Yorker - USA (2019-12-16)

80 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019

Kristen Stewart plays the ill-fated movie star in Benedict Andrews’s film.

THECURRENTCINEMA

COMPLEX PERSECUTION

“Seberg” and “In Fabric.”

BY ANTHONY LANE

ILLUSTRATION BY CARI VANDER YACHT

A

remarkable scene at a ritzy club, in
Otto Preminger’s “Bonjour Tris­
tesse” (1958), shows a young woman
dancing first with a spruce admirer and
then with her doting father. She has
short blond hair and a halter­neck dress;
the men are in tuxedos. As they take
her in their arms on the dance floor, she
looks over their shoulders and holds us

in her unnerving gaze—not so much
smashing the fourth wall as gently tap­
ping it and staring at us through the
crack. She talks to us, too, in voice­over,
confessing how little the perks of priv­
ilege mean to her. “I can’t feel anything
he might be interested in,” she says of
the younger man. Despite this candor,
we sense that she is keeping something
back. So, what is she: a spoiled brat, a
sad case, or a cornered spirit, angling
for a chance to cut and run?
The woman’s name is Cécile, and she
is played by Jean Seberg. Two years after
Preminger’s film, Seberg strolled into
Godard’s “Breathless” as Patricia, the
all­American in Paris, crying “New York
Herald Tribune!” up and down the
Champs­Élysées. She was now wear­

ing a T­shirt and flats, but the restless­

ness, and the blond crop, as neat as a

choirboy’s, remained. And, lo, here they

are again, in Benedict Andrews’s “Se­

berg,” in which the title role is taken by

Kristen Stewart.

Stewart’s voice is lower than Seberg’s,

her smile more hesitant, her chin more

determined, and the gleam in her eyes

a touch more dulled with knowingness,

as if the innocence to which Seberg

somehow clung were no longer avail­

able; Stewart, though, is not in the busi­

ness of impersonation. Her task, which

she fulfills with terrific intent, is to chart

the downfall of a resolute but precari­

ous soul who was ill­suited to take the

plunge. The movie’s larger mission is to

prove that not an inch of that descent

was of Seberg’s making. She was pushed.

Seberg was born in Marshalltown,

Iowa, in 1938 and died in Paris in 1979.

Her decomposing body was found in a

car, along with a note to her teen­age

son, Diego, and a bottle of pills: a ter­

rible conclusion to an errant life. It’s a

blessing, I suppose, that the writers of

“Seberg,” Anna Waterhouse and Joe

Shrapnel, resist the temptation to cram

that life into a bio­pic. Rather than range

far and wide, they focus on one espe­

cially murky patch, beginning in 1968.

We find Seberg preparing to fly from

Paris, where she lives with her husband,

Romain Gary (Yvan Attal), to her na­

tive land. On the plane, she meets Hakim

Jamal (Anthony Mackie), an activist of

charismatic renown, and, upon landing

in Los Angeles, joins him in giving the

Black Power salute. The assembled press

is watching. So is the F.B.I.

Seberg’s political sympathies are com­

mon knowledge, but now she goes fur­

ther. She sleeps with Jamal, and harkens

to his earnest decrees. “If you can change

one mind, you can change the world,”

he tells her. (The line is repeated later,

in case we didn’t catch it.) Mackie—one

of the few actors, surely, who can exude

menace while sporting a tiger­ striped

satin top and matching shorts—lends

the soft­spoken Jamal a seductive edge,

and, before long, Seberg is writing checks

for his educational project. Her contri­

bution, however, is not popular, either

with Jamal’s tough­minded wife, Doro­

thy (Zazie Beetz), who calls the actress

“a tourist,” or at the Bureau, where, under

the baneful aegis of J. Edgar Hoover, the

decision has been made to persecute Se­

berg. She is to be photographed, bugged,

and shamed. The Puritan appetite needs

regular sating; every generation, you could

say, must have its Hester Prynne.

The maltreatment of Seberg is a mat­

ter of record. It is true that, when she

became pregnant, the F.B.I. triggered a

rumor, quite without foundation, that

one of the Black Panthers was the fa­

ther; according to an internal memo,

from 1970, “It is felt that the possible

publication of SEBERG’s plight could

cause her embarrassment and serve to

cheapen her image with the general

public.” It’s also true that the baby sur­

vived for only a few days and that the

casket was opened, at Seberg’s request,

so that mourners could see that her child

was white—a display that the film, mer­

cifully, does not seek to re­create. The

iniquity of what was done to Seberg,

harrying her into a breakdown, is be­

yond dispute; but there’s a problem with

Andrews’s movie. Where is the center

of gravity in this sorry tale?

Much of the narrative is occupied by

an F.B.I. greenhorn, Jack Solomon ( Jack