Jean Seberg - Played Out

I read the first few chapters of David Richards biography of Jean Seberg, documenting her pre-stardom life in Iowa, through the audition for Preminger, who 'had not discovered an actress, but engaged a puppet' and subsequent shooting of both St.Joan and Bonjour Tristesse. 'It was like putting fresh clean putty in Otto's hands'. I learnt that she wasn't a virgin when she met Preminger (not sure why I was surprised to learn that, maybe the Cinderella story that Preminger had encouraged the press to promote as 'America in the 1950's had outgrown its small towns, but not its small town values', has lasted), and that she met Françoise Sagan, who was not convinced she could play the part of Cècile. 'Jean's winsomeness was in direct opposition to the velvet amorality of Sagan's book'.

Once filming had begun, driving around Nice in her tinny little Citroën, Jean felt "every inch Françoise Sagan's much poorer Iowa cousin". At the same time, fantasising about a relationship with a musician who wasn't as keen on her, she daydreamed about the affair, playing his music constantly in her little flat. This strikes me as typically teenage and typically female, and again, like with Rachel Cooke, I'm finding that there are 3 characters who merge to form the idea of who Cécile is: Sagan, Seberg and the fictional character herself, Cécile.

There is also a bit about the oddness of Preminger being the director of the film, 'temperamentally he was hardly the one to be filming Sagan's fragile tale...(he)...brought a conventional morality to the story and insisted on punishing the characters for their dalliance' and there is a lot of evidence that his directorial technique, demanding, crushing and controlling, damaged Seberg's confidence dramatically: 'She had retreated behind a mask and buried emotions, which, only a year before, had seemed irrepressible', and 'Otto wanted nothing less than total control'.

After the critical and commercial failure of St. Joan, and now, 'fully disenchanted with her', Preminger's casting of her as Cècile was 'less to do with her burgeoning talents than his own desire for vindication'. 'His rages resumed on a daily basis', and when she informed him of when her period was (a bad time of the month to film sea scenes in her bathing suit), he apparently ignored her and scheduled the scenes for that exact time. Seberg, 'shivering less from the chill than from the verbal abuse, carried on until she was near the point of fainting'.

When Sagan visited the set, she 'watched the shooting impassively and left unimpressed.'

Preminger was 'punishing her for being herself' and told her 'I don't like the way you talk, walk or dress.' He had already 'arranged to have the moles removed from her face and throat', and unwittingly stamped out the sincerity she had had in her initial audition. Now he was progressively eliminating her natural vivacity until she was a shadow of herself. A cool, detached beauty. He was creating an icon that would be her springboard to super stardom.

François Truffaut picked up on Otto's influence, effusing about her in Cahiers du cinema:

Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect: this kind of sex appeal hasn't been seen on the screen. It is designed, controlled, directed to the nth degree by her director, who is, they say, her fiancé. I wouldn't be surprised, given the kind of love one needs to obtain such perfection...It is Otto Preminger's love poem to her.

And her very last scene, where Preminger wanted her 'totally expressionless, except for tears slowly welling up in her eyes', was referenced by Godard as an inspiration for the character she would play in Breathless: "I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started after dissolving to a title: "Three years later"."

Taking acting lessons, after the shoot had ended, her tutor remarked that 'although I hadn't heard the Preminger stories, it was obvious someone had traumatized her.'

Pretty sure, particularly in her suicidal moments, that Jean Seberg didn't feel the love, and didn't like the love poem that Preminger had given her.

She was certainly surprised about the Seberg persona of the cool detached beauty which Preminger moulded and Godard exploited, as she pictured herself as 'racked with inner doubts and tumultuous emotions'.

A real person.

And much more like the fictional character of Cécile.