Chloë Sevigny, right, and Claes Bang appear in Durga Chew-Bose’s directorial debut, Bonjour Tristesse.Elevation Pictures
Chloe Sevigny calls herself an aesthetic snob. On sets, she’s hyper-aware of the framing of a shot and believes everything in that frame should be thoroughly considered. As a result, “I’ve been told a lot of times on sets to focus on my own job,” she said in a video interview this week. “But I feel it’s unfair to say that. I feel like ‘my’ job also involves the props and things I’m interacting with.”
Hard concur. What kind of idiot director hires Chloe Sevigny, who’s been stylish since kindergarten, and then ignores her aesthetic instincts?
She’s too well-mannered to name names. But thank goodness that list does not include the Canadian writer/director Durga Chew-Bose, who instead welcomed and encouraged Sevigny’s input on their new film, Bonjour Tristesse, which opens this week.
“Chloe is extremely specific,” Chew-Bose told me in an interview last September, when Bonjour Tristesse premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. “She knows how her character would and would not arrange flowers. She taught me there’s always a little bit more work to do, there’s always an adjustment you can make – that you have to go for it, and she would.”
“She’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, really playful and teasing,” Chew-Bose continues. “And she’s soft. We’d talk about our sons, the beauty and frustration of being working mothers. People often say an actor has range. But Chloe has range on a deeply soulful level. The day we wrapped her, there were tears on set. People didn’t want her to go.”
The novel Bonjour Tristesse, by Françoise Sagan, was a sensation when it was published in 1954; Chew-Bose gives it a 21st-century update. Sevigny plays Anne, a buttoned-up fashion designer whose extreme punctiliousness disturbs the languorous, south-of-France, coming-of-age summer that teenage Cecile (Lily McInerny) is having alongside her father Raymond (Claes Bang) and his younger lover Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). While everyone else is lolling, Anne sits upright; she sports scalp-scraping chignons with centre parts as severe as the equator, wears pearls to the beach, and cuts pineapples and apples with military precision. “She’s very organized, even in her heart,” Raymond tells Cecile. She’s also self-contained, enigmatic, lonely and fascinating.
“It was a delight to edit Chloe’s scenes,” Chew-Bose says. “I’d pore over them, trying to find those little things she does that might be imperceptible, and let them shine.” In one of those micro-moments, Anne adjusts the position of a decorative dish on a dresser by a fraction of an inch. Which might sound like nothing, were this not a film that is precisely about micro-moments.
“Anne has devoted herself to her art,” Sevigny says. “She chose work over family. I respect that.”
Sevigny has been working since Grade 5, when she swept the clay tennis courts at a yacht club, in tony Darien, Conn., to which her more bohemian family did not belong. When she was 19 and about to break out in Kids, Larry Clark’s provocation of a movie, Jay McInerney dubbed her “the coolest girl in the world” in a New Yorker profile. At 25, she earned an Oscar nomination for Boys Don’t Cry. In 2024 she played an Auntie Mame among It Girls in the video for Charli XCX’s 360, strutting bare-thighed down the street in a short jacket and tall boots.
This past November she turned 50, “which feels transitional all over again,” she says. “I’ve had a great run. I’m still running. But I feel different in my body now. When I look at myself, I’m seeing the undeniable physical changes. Midlife is awkward. The hormonal changes, the questions – do I grow my grays out?” She laughs. “I’d almost rather skip over this part and be an old lady.” On the other hand, “I have a confidence now, a wherewithal, not giving a toot about some things. I don’t have as much to prove. I’m more comfortable doing my own thing.”
So it’s not surprising that she “pushed up against some tropes” in Bonjour Tristesse. “Does the older woman always have to have grace and elegance?” Sevigny asks. “Do we want to keep propelling this story, where an older woman is left for a younger one? Then again, I see that happening around me, even with close personal friends.”
Ever the iconoclast, Sevigny went the other way: In 2020, she married the gallerist Sinisa Mackovic, who is 13 years younger than she. “He’s really smart,” Sevigny says. “He knows a lot about film, music and art. He’s a workaholic. He’s engaged in the world. He’s also Serbian and had to flee the war. But he is a generation younger, and he calls me out on some things.”
They have a son, Vanja, who’s 5. Becoming a mother impacted Sevigny’s choices – the roles she takes, and the way she plays them. But she’s still drawn to unnerving stories, and to the showrunners and directors who are interested in them. She wants to deal in truths, however uncomfortable. “Playing Kitty Menendez on Monsters,” Sevigny says, referring to the Netflix series, “having a mother say, ‘I don’t like my children. I don’t like the way they interrupted my life,’ is something you don’t hear a lot. Examining and saying out loud things that people don’t do very often is interesting to me.”
“But I’d love to be in a sweeping period drama or a romance. I’d love to be in a Merchant/Ivory type film – those are my favourite kinds of movies. They haven’t come calling yet. I think early on I got established as this indie provocateur, and it’s hard to get out of the boxes that people put you in.”
Speaking of controlling the frame: As we’re talking, Sevigny is sitting on a sofa, and her video camera is tilted up just enough to capture a distracting piece of art on the wall behind her: In bold lines and colours, a naked woman reclines, legs spread, fire burning around her loins.
“It’s Rita Ackermann,” Sevigny says. (The Hungarian-born abstract artist lives in New York and often makes work about femininity.) “I find it disarming.”
I tell her I do, too. She grins. “I like to have this flaming crotch behind me,” she says. “It feels empowering.”
