Jean-Marc Barr Hopes ‘Zentropa’ Will Change His Heartthrob Image

Jean-Marc Barr describes his latest film, “Zentropa,” opening Thursday at the Nuart, as Kafka’s version of “The Graduate.”

In the stylized thriller set in postwar Germany, Barr plays a German-American pacifist who moves to Germany to fight for peace. “It’s the film of our generation on World War II,” Barr, 32, says.

He says that “Zentropa,” which won the Jury Prize at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, is “a very strange film. The ending is like the Samuel Beckett version of ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ ”

Barr himself is a product of a World War II union. “My father was an American pilot for the Air Force, he met a French woman after the war and I was born in Germany.”

For the first two decades of his life, Barr was an All-American boy, residing in Virginia, Maryland and San Diego. After a year at UCLA, the former surfer split and moved to Paris.

“I just had to leave,” he says. “I felt numb in California. I needed a big change. I was supposed to go to the Air Force Academy, so I really needed to make a big escape.”

Barr, who had dabbled in acting in California, began his professional career on the Paris stage and studied at London’s Guild Hall School of Music and Dance.

Making his film debut in 1985’s “King David,” Barr became the hottest thing in France since the croissant when he starred in Luc Besson’s 1987 film, “The Big Blue,” in which he played a free diver.

But Barr wasn’t comfortable as a heartthrob. “I had a young following. (My popularity) was taking on the commercial dimensions of T-shirts and games and lunch boxes.”

“Zentropa,” Barr says, has helped change his image as the flavor of the month. “It’s suicidal for an actor to be thrown into an image and locked there for the rest of his life,” Barr says. “That’s not what an actor is about.”