Until its taut closing stages, Benedict Andrews’ film does scant justice to the story of Breathless star Jean Seberg’s persecution by the FBI
“New York Herald Tribune,” cried 21-year-old Jean Seberg as she marched down the Champs-Élysées. She was an
American in Paris: the imported poster girl of Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary Breathless. Few actors embodied the footloose buoyancy of the New Wave like Seberg, an airy midwesterner with a political edge. And few would have guessed that she was heading for the rocks.
No doubt there’s a brilliant tragic drama to be made about the life of Seberg, who spoke out for civil rights, supported the Black Panthers and was duly dragged through the mud by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. But it emphatically isn’t Benedict Andrews’ bantamweight biopic, a tale of shadowy US history that feels machine-tooled and suspect and is shot with the hyper-real lighting one normally finds in a photographer’s studio or shopping mall. It tells us that Seberg was wronged and that she looked really great in a bra – and not necessarily in that order.