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Canberra Today 22°/24° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Movie review / ‘Seberg’ (M) ***

“Seberg” (M) ***

FROM director Benedict Andrews and writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse comes this account of the illegal clandestine FBI surveillance of actress Jean Seberg between 1968 and 1971 because of her involvement with Malcolm Little, aka El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, better known to history as Malcolm X, in the film called Hakim Jamal and played by Anthony Mackie.

Seberg made some significant movies in the French “new wave” period. She indeed had a political conscience centred on the treatment of black Americans. But her principal talent was probably located lower. Coming from middle America, she began her cinema career by being burned at the stake in Otto Preminger’s film of Shaw’s “Saint Joan” before going on to work with major French directors. 

It seems probable that while Seberg’s native awareness of the world was enough to get her roles in many movies, her intellectual assets came second to undeniable beauty. In Andrews’ film, Kristen Stewart plays her as a woman needing men to sustain her life – as well as marrying two French and one American movie directors, she had several lovers. She drank her whisky straight. But the real danger with which she dealt less than cautiously was her racial sympathies. She gave significant financial support to Malcolm X.

While that was going on, the FBI was busy implementing J Edgar Hoover’s instruction to discredit her by discovering or creating a dossier of her private life. The agent doing the donkey work in that exercise was Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell).

The film’s depiction of FBI field work and upper management is of an agency that did as Hoover ordered – clumsy, unsubtle, impolite, intrusive. Those behaviours form a major part of the film. The rest includes resentment from black American women.

What good she brought to cinema is now little remembered. Whether her death in France aged 40 was murder or suicide has never been established.

At Palace Electric, Dendy and Hoyts

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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