Lily McInerny stars in Bonjour Tristesse.Elevation Pictures
Bonjour Tristesse
Directed by Durga Chew-Bose
Written by Durga Chew-Bose, based on the novel by Françoise Sagan
Starring Lily McInerny, Claes Bang and Chloë Sevigny
Classification N/A; 110 minutes
Opens in select theatres May 2
Critic’s Pick
In 1954, 18-year-old Françoise Sagan published her novella Bonjour Tristesse, about a spoiled teenager whose leisurely Côte d’Azur-set summer is thwarted by the arrival of a woman her father once knew. It ignited the French public with intrigue and detestation – literary critic John Metcalf quickly called it “a vulgar, sad little book” – if not for its grievous finale, then for its girlish narrator engaging in midsummer fornication. This coolly transgressive text is now the basis of a remarkable 2024 adaptation, transposed into the French Riviera of today by Montreal-based essayist Durga Chew-Bose (Too Much and Not the Mood).
Reviving Sagan’s text 70 years after its publication seems almost perverse. When Otto Preminger adapted Bonjour Tristesse in 1958, with a novice Jean Seberg in the lead, it had been a mere four years since the novella roused the public. Even in its gluey languor, it had the exciting seal of notoriety, of being “on time.” Rest assured, Chew-Bose’s debut film is neither late nor unexciting; it is appropriately bitten off from the repressive climate of pre-Neuwirth Law France, and able to engage its existential manner with care and ingenuity.
We first see young Cécile (Lily McInerny) deadly relaxed and splayed out on a beach with her neighbouring beau, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), whose chain shimmers at the nape of his neck in a way only a teenage girl might notice—and she does. Cécile retreats to the handsome coastal villa she shares with her widower father Raymond (Claes Bang), also imposingly handsome, and his latest flame, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). This family’s routine is deliciously sedate, filled with daytime plunges, shell collecting, card games, and reading aloud. (Sagan was, in fact, her own pampered archetype, an adolescent who spent long stretches on yachts and estates.)
Cécile, played with saucer-eyed wonder by McInerny, gets lots of mileage out of the adult spheres of action around her. She and Raymond smoke cigarettes on the veranda and exchange lofty truisms, and she watches Elsa with slight ambition, as if studying for a test—which Cécile is pointedly not doing after carelessly flunking her baccalaureates. As with the source material, it is hard to believe any world exists beyond this cerulean landscape in which time and obligation seem to liquefy.
What director Durga Chew-Bose gets so right about these characters is their very performativity, building a lifestyle where everyone is legible to each other despite a desire to remain unknowable.olivia nasner/Elevation Pictures
The atmosphere shifts with the arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Raymond and Cécile’s mother, now a prolific fashion designer living in Paris. She immediately notes how spoiled Cécile is, and Anne seems to put everyone simultaneously at ease and on edge. She is matronly in a way Cécile initially finds admirable, but when this elegant interloper suggests she prepare to retake her exams in the fall or stop seeing Cyril, dread begins to set in. “Your silence is different,” she tells Raymond after he gets closer to Anne. “I’m not in on it.”
Chew-Bose’s scenes, by way of cinematographer Maximilian Pittner, scintillate in the sun, intimately detailing this bourgeois setting with confidence. Perhaps it is Sagan’s detail that Anne is a couturier, or Chew-Bose’s own background in fashion (having been the editor-in-chief of SSENSE not too long ago) that animates the clothing in this film so dramatically. Fabrics move like water and gowns become set pieces, aided by costume designer Miyako Bellizzi’s eye for archival garments.
Some early critical reactions of Chew-Bose’s film gestured to the shopworn slogan of “style over substance,” a tedious judgment that interprets these two tenets of storytelling—flourish and heft—as oppositional. Her film is most functional as a tragedy of silks, where these affluent, faraway characters are punished by their own indulgence, with the ruthlessness of the original text softened for today. The film veers quite romantic, saccharine when it needs to be, in the way that a 17-year-old girl socialized into the coastal bourgeoisie would experience it.
What Chew-Bose gets so right about these characters is their very performativity, building a lifestyle where everyone is legible to each other despite a desire to remain unknowable. This is even communicated through the fragmentary editing, where moments of leisure are truncated just before one might expect. In March, Chew-Bose told me in an interview that she often opted for the imperfect take: “I liked the offish version of the line reading because if it’s a little wrong, it’s going to last forever.”
This question of permanence informs Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, carefully arranged to both appreciate and withdraw from its predecessors—an approach which dutifully replicates Cécile’s own trajectory and a marker of a truly assured filmmaker.
