MIFF

FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG

Director Mark Rappaport / 1995 / USA
MIFF 1996
The director of the provocative Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992), Mark Rappaport, takes n equally idiosyncratic and unconventional approach to a biographical documentary charting the career of the suicidal screen starlet, Jean Seberg. Opening with the actress's widely publicised discovery in a nationwide talent search, Mary Beth Hurt (Interiors, The World According To Garp, Slaves of New York) 'plays Seberg', recreating her life in the first person, guiding the audience through an extensives eries of clips and photographs from Seberg's Hollywood and European careers and Ironically assessing her lucky breaks and crippling misfortunes.

Enormously entertaining, digressive and conspiratorial, Rappaport's film attends to both Seberg's personal and professional life a Hollywood has-been at 19. a nouvelle vague icon (alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo) at 21 and dead at 40. From her catastrophic casting in Saint Joan (1957), breakthrough Breathless (1960). involvement with the Black Panther movement, subsequent FBl surveillance, drugs, alcohol, famous husbands and affairs, vilification in the press, mental 'stability to eventual death, in 1979, at her own and. Crisp, alive with gossip and speculation, from The ]ournals Of ]ean Seberg is lucid, thought provoking and compulsively entertaining.

The wit and invention of Rappaport's script the tireless stream of wry observations and judiciously chosen, sharply edited clips makes this a singularly stimulating entry in the doomed star canon" David Rooney. Variety

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