They Should Make A Movie Of That: Breathless: Jean Seberg

WHAT’S IT ABOUT? Actress Jean Seberg is one of the most endlessly fascinating figures in world cinema. She was a one-time American starlet who was there at the birth of The French New Wave, and a rebel femme who copped more heat from the FBI than John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. Garry McGee’s involving biography, Breathless, tracks Seberg’s beginnings as a small town misfit in the conservative backwaters of Iowa, through to her heralded discovery as a teen, when she was plucked from obscurity to star in Otto Preminger’s disastrous 1957 production of Saint Joan. Like a phoenix from the ashes, however, Seberg became a hipster superstar when French director Jean-Luc Godard cast her in his groundbreaking classic, Breathless. While Seberg’s career was an unusual and rocky one, her personal life was even more unconventional. She went through a number of combustible relationships and high profile affairs, and was a fearless, hands-on supporter of various civil rights organisations, most notably the radical Black Panther Party. It was Seberg’s political ferocity that would ultimately bring her undone. When she was seven months pregnant, the FBI sparked a vicious rumour that the child was not fathered by her husband, director Romain Gary, but by a member of The Black Panthers. The stress and public humiliation caused Seberg to miscarry, which would haunt her until her suspicious death in 1979, from an overdose of booze and barbiturates.

WHY WOULD IT MAKE A GOOD MOVIE? Though heartbreaking, Jean Seberg’s life story is jam-packed with drama, as she crosses through The Golden Age Of Hollywood, The French New Wave, the political unrest of the sixties, and the social malaise of the seventies. Her romantic relationships (most notably with the decent but distant Romain Gary, and the considerably younger Ahmed Hasni, who financially duped and physically abused her) ran the gamut from enriching to excoriating; her struggles with depression and addiction were nothing short of gargantuan; and her persecution at the hands of the FBI and its repulsive, Machiavellian director, J. Edgar Hoover (detailed in Garry McGee’s other book, Neutralized: The FBI Vs. Jean Seberg) was a striking example of the organisation’s near-criminal practice of hulking unceremoniously outside of its jurisdiction. Grimly moving, Jean Seberg’s story is almost Shakespearean in the scope of its tragedy.

WHO SHOULD MAKE IT? Jean Seberg’s bizarre, baroque life demands an equally unusual director, and with her stunning 2002 biopic Frida (about stand-alone Mexican artist Frida Kahlo), Julie Taymor proved herself a master at telling the tale of a creative and societal rebel. Seberg’s story would surely light up the director’s highly original brand of visual and narrative flair.

WHO SHOULD BE IN IT? Currently enjoying a mini-comeback courtesy of TV’s Show Me A Hero and the upcoming Stranger Things, Winona Ryder’s beauty, talent, and appearance of somewhat indeterminate age mark her as the ideal actress to essay Jean Seberg from her plucky youth to her death at age 41. While there would be ample opportunity for eye catching cameos (Anthony Hopkins as Otto Preminger, Vincent Cassel as Jean-Luc Godard, Tom Sizemore as J. Edgar Hoover, Don Cheadle as Black Panthers leader, Huey P. Newton), the other two principal roles would be that of Seberg’s yin-yang lovers – director/novelist/diplomat Romain Gary (The Intouchables’ François Cluzet) and oily grifter Ahmed Hasni (The Dreamers’ Louis Garrel).