Beatrice Loayza
In Durga Chew-Bose’s visually hypnotic reinvention of Françoise Sagan’s coming-of-age novel, a study in the sensuous subtleties of adolescent girlhood and female dynamics.
Aliocha Schneider as Cyril and Lily McInerny as Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
Bonjour Tristesse, written and directed by Durga Chew-Bose,
now in theaters
• • •
Published in 1954, Françoise Sagan’s revelatory novel Bonjour Tristesse tells the story of a precocious teenage girl whose ideas about love and freedom have been shaped by her womanizing father. Shuffling through lovers and moving through her easy, boring life in pursuit of small pleasures seems perfectly natural to her, though she’s only beginning to put her bohemian philosophy into practice when the book opens during her sumptuous summer vacation in the Côte d’Azur. Mid-century readers were scandalized and/or captivated by the book’s casual hedonism—and by the fact that it was written by an eighteen-year-old girl. Several countries banned it; in 1958, Hollywood turned it into a movie whose abusive director (Otto Preminger) and ingenuous young star (Jean Seberg) made headlines of their own. The text’s sheen of provocation and sensational popularity, compounded by the hand-wringing of some conservative critics who saw nothing but decadence in Sagan’s vision, somewhat distracted from its great emotional depth—though today, more than seventy years after its initial publication, it’s something of a blueprint for confessional, psychologically probing literature about female consciousness.
Naïlia Harzoune as Elsa, Claes Bang as Raymond, Lily McInerny as Cécile, and Chloë Sevigny as Anne in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse—her first film, and the second adaptation after Preminger’s Technicolor melodrama—arrives well past the novel’s most recent resurrection. In 2008, it was republished in a two-in-one edition alongside Sagan’s second book, A Certain Smile (1956), and in 2013, a new English-language translation by Heather Lloyd appeared on bookstands—both editions feature an introduction by Rachel Cusk. Alongside Eve Babitz and Joan Didion, Sagan fit squarely into the “cool girl” literary canon championed by the writers and readers of millennial-oriented online publications and the users of microblogging platforms like Tumblr, which hit its cultural peak in the early 2010s. I remember seeing quotes from Bonjour Tristesse overlaid with melancholy images of wilted flowers and slouching Sebergian women on that site—images that would have been easier to poke fun at had Tumblr not been such a useful vehicle of discovery for bookish adolescents like myself. Chew-Bose came to prominence as a writer in this digital context, with her first collection of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017), mirroring the intimate yet aloof and associative textures of her own Tumblr account. With this in mind, her desire to helm a modern reinvention of Bonjour Tristesse makes sense.
Lily McInerny as Cécile and Aliocha Schneider as Cyril in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
The strengths of Chew-Bose’s adaptation are in the visual details. Following a hypnotizing opening-credit sequence of jewel-toned bricks shot like Mondrian paintings, the first thing we see is the shirtless back of a beautiful boy, his lean musculature covered in flaxen peach fuzz. Cyril (Aliocha Schneider) is the summer boyfriend of eighteen-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny), the film’s protagonist. Settled into a splendid villa in Cassis for the season, Cécile spends much of her time snuggling with Cyril on limestone cliffs and swaying sailboats, or smoking cigs and spacing out with her insouciant father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and his girlfriend, Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune). As in the work of Sofia Coppola, the film’s sensuous display of beautiful objects and textures complement Cécile’s Bildung, with Chew-Bose situating the teenager’s process of self-discovery within the rustic environs and minimalist luxuries of her leisure-class milieu. The arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an impossibly composed fashion designer and old friend of Raymond’s whom he has invited to the villa, both upends and intensifies Cécile’s awakening.
Naïlia Harzoune as Elsa, Claes Bang as Raymond, and Chloë Sevigny as Anne in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
Chew-Bose is, for the most part, loyal to the novel’s trajectory: Raymond tosses Elsa over for Anne, who forces Cécile to give up Cyril and spend more time studying for her exams—demands she resents. In retaliation, Cécile concocts a plan with Cyril and Elsa to lure Raymond back into Elsa’s arms. As Chew-Bose has stated in several interviews, her adaptation differs from Sagan’s book and Preminger’s film owing to the fact she is “drawn to the women.” She emphasizes the triangulation of Anne, Cécile, and Elsa—the latter of whom isn’t a sunburnt bimbo, as she is in the novel and Preminger’s movie, but an assured multiracial beauty, the kind of modern woman hardened to love’s whims and ambiguities. In one handsome frame, the three women eat apples: Elsa is munching cozily in a lawn chair while Anne stands erect, slicing neat pieces of the fruit with a knife; Cécile mills around, noncommittal, until she, too, decides to pick up a pomme of her own.
Lily McInerny as Cécile, Naïlia Harzoune as Elsa, and Chloë Sevigny as Anne in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
Other scenes that focus on similar gestural subtleties—such as the way Anne’s hands cut pineapple with remarkable precision or linger over Raymond’s chest as if grazing a sheet of silk—most effectively convey the characters’ inner lives. So too does the film’s attention to personal ornamentation: Anne’s pearl-drop earrings, chunky silver ring, and funneled chignon. Elsa, meanwhile, struts around in skintight maxi dresses and messy buns, exhibiting a casual, earthy sexiness in sharp contrast to Anne’s cool, controlled mien. Both are beloved—and attentively observed—by Cécile, though only one of them challenges the status quo.
Naïlia Harzoune as Elsa and Lily McInerny as Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
For Sagan’s Cécile, Anne is more an “entity” than a woman, which could also be said for Sevigny, the quintessential It girl of the 1990s. The gritty downtown mystique of Sevigny’s earlier years feeds into Anne’s allure, her history with Raymond and Cécile’s deceased mother preserved as a kind of adults-only secret behind the character’s “beautiful mask of disdain” (to use Sagan’s words). But if Sevigny—who recently portrayed a paragon of matronly aplomb and old-money glamour as C. Z. Guest in Capote vs. The Swans—shares Anne’s “languid grace,” her character is diminished by the film’s vintage mannerisms and narrative opacity.
Lily McInerny as Cécile and Chloë Sevigny as Anne in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
There’s an artifice, a forced delicacy, to Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse that extends most egregiously to the dialogue, a collection of aphorisms—some more clever than others—meant to telegraph each woman’s wisdom and acuity: “Seasonal love can swallow you up,” Anne tells Cécile. “It feels limitless, like a song.” If the novel lends itself to big, declarative statements about human nature, it’s by dint of its first-person narration (a conceit that Preminger’s film partially retains), which looks back on past events at a mournful, meditative remove, that this strategy works. Chew-Bose’s script, in discarding this charged, intimate point of view and choosing instead to drift in doting observation, loses the story’s guiding frictions—the cruelty and ambivalence of a girl on the cusp of womanhood confronting the possibility of change.
Lily McInerny as Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse. Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment.
Chew-Bose’s approach to character mistakes curiosity for depth, peculiarity for flesh-and-bones individuality. Absent an alternative through line beyond its greater (but nevertheless fuzzy) appreciation for the women in the cast, the film invites comparison to its predecessors to its detriment. The novel, a tragedy about the construction of self-awareness and the confrontational, at times violent ways that adolescent girls forge their own identities apart from older role models, is here diluted into feminine aspirationalism cleaved by a seemingly arbitrary bout of juvenile vindictiveness. Ultimately, upon Anne’s death (or possible suicide), Cécile says hello to sadness—to her own capacity for shame and remorse—but that transformation feels woefully unmerited.
Beatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the New York Times, the Criterion Collection, Film Comment, the Nation, and other publications.