Bonjour Tristesse

Bonjour-Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse

The 1958 “Bonjour Tristesse” film is probably the bane of Hollywood today. Why? Because it is the interpretation of a French teenage girl book by a controversial filmmaker and controversial book’s husband. “He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away,” Jean Seberg lamented about the director, Otto Preminger. Well, brace yourselves because this time around we are looking forward to a more stylish perspective, and asking the question: what would the film be like if it were a woman telling Sagan’s words and images? Even more interesting, what would it feel like to be watching it?

This nostalgic longing is explored through the eyes of Chew-Bose, who poses as a mother recalling for her daughter the hazy memories of going to France as a child; such beautiful details include the sun of the Côte d’Azur brushing against one’s skin, the cool breeze that comes from staring at a wide-open ice pouch on a sweltering summer night, the smell left by Dad’s aftershave, etc. Hiring a woman to shoot this picture was absolutely Correct, for these beautiful moments just beg to be captured on film; unfortunately, Ms. Chew-Bose’s first feature feels too much like a beautiful tho empty postcard from South France.

According to Chew-Bose, there is a sense of innocence that now fuels Cécile’s, played by Lily McInerny over Seberg, now, though, until today, It’s so, muffed so, cast The new film will make the rounds, perhaps garner a few followers and then it will do a disappearance act, without doing much damage to Preminger’s version.

Claes Bang, from the Square, plays Cécile’s father a radiant Raymond, who takes Cécile and his new girlfriend Elsa Naïlia Harzoune to a vacation home in France: ‘The French movie set is such a fresh style that you have to appreciate it’ comments Bang. Cécile watches as her father whom she was widowed in Jerusalem, goes out with countless women but is enraged when he rings one of her mother’s old pals with whom, seconds later, he wants to wed, Chloë Sevigny and she becomes the target of his affection. There is something about Anne that does fit the bill of what a dad is looking for and she is played by Sevigny who quite literally fails to sell this premise. Cécile fashions a scheme to wreak havoc between her old dad and her new stepmother combining elements from Parent Trap or maybe Shakespeare’s or his several comedies.

In this earlier movie, Seberg looks at the mirror, analyzing the lines on the face of the envious pixie cut blonde who would later appear in Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ when she says, ‘It’s not his fault that he doesn’t love you. It’s your fault. You are ruined. And rebellious. And arrogant. And sluggish.’ If Chew-Bose writes Cécile in such a narrative, she, however, avoids this kind of elementary psychological interpretation, asking us to sympathize with the teenager so that bummer summer in the end does not seem an alien tragedy, but, rather, the disappointment and jingles she brought back cherished our hearts.

Much of the film is devoted to simply languishing in the relaxed moments that, laced with a degree of sloth, have still been expertly constructed (by talented DP Maximilian Pittner) to elicit a diffusion of urban ennui. Cécile writes her boyfriend secret texts on his arm and leg and falls asleep in a slouch chair painted a mustard yellow. Even the manner in which she spreads the butter on the toast is strikingly indelible.

Others might think of Sofia Coppola saying to Chew-Bose: ‘Focus on those sensations.’ This interpretation is equally aware of what is missing, such as the echoes of “Call Me by Your Name” in both Cécile’s first love and later, more mature reading of her behavior. But perhaps the most correct association is with Jacques Deray’s “La Piscine” where Alain Delon and Romy Schneider were sunbathing next to the pool about the tenth year after Preminger’s movie came out.

Annotation: Here is Chew-Bose’s quintessential foolishness. Others might also note her willful stupidity, but that’s another topic. No reason at all, and plenty of bad foreshadowing – the director places her vision in the recent past. Why this change happens still remains mysterious. Sagan’s book in many ways predicted a revolution in the sexual sphere. Instead of the material that set the pace of development for all around it, she now appears to look cool. In reality, Cécile’s more than modest gaudiness, in capital letters, laughable even for Cyril Aliocha Schneider, was shocking in such a rare abyss of plausibility.

As much as we may bat an eye at the modern signposts, it is pertinent to note that the movie ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ appears like a midcentury upset a calmer respite from the aggression sites of the present epoch, rife with monotonous activities and old-world charm. From the multicolored tiles that somehow come after the opening credits (there’s no beating the ones by Saul Bass in the original) to the old fashions such as the vintage fashions that Sevigny on her head, with some scenes showing McInerny in various old-fashioned swimsuits, one does not grasp what Anne signifies.

Why would anyone want to cast someone like Sevigny, a counterculture symbol, into the role of a blunt cosmopolitan saying codewords? It is an odd casting decision, reminiscent of the one made by Luca Guadagnino when he put Tilda Swinton in the history of his ‘La Piscine’ remake. Wholly intrigued by such remarkable and eccentric stars, their directors do not understand how inappropriate they appear in such situations or the fact that they physically interfere with the dramatic turn that those directors wanted to achieve in these films.

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