Bonjour Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse
“Bonjour Tristesse,” the cinematic film is such a perfect capitalization of the book about the life of a French teenage girl. However, there are a lot of critics of this movie, simply because they cannot accept a vision of a woman being exploited. Its controversial media character Otto premature has been vilified to the extent that most the younger generation of soft actresses would oppose being nominated for a role in any such movie to avoid being tagged as one being referred in the movie itself.
Its cast is directed by famous US actress Jean Seberg. While knowing what the director thinks about her, she plainly states: ‘He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away.’ It really seems strange, funny perhaps, how people would actually strive for an artistic way to escape self-doubt and a suffering lady features in it, but, in reality, would be disregarded.
Durga Chew-Bose, an American-Grenadian director, thanks to modern techniques, hints at many shifts: the touch of the Sun on the surface of the skin, the feelings of relief while sitting in front of an open box filled with ice during a hot summer night, the fragrant scent of the aftershave lotion, still doesn’t resonate in harmony. Breathtaking aesthetic imagery of Cote d’Azur is perfectly showcased through her narrations. In conclusion: cry if you like to, great memories come first.
Though Chew-Bose may be more generous about what motivates Seberg first and McInerny now as the movie’s character to join a father’s romantic life, it is still shoddy at best and rather uncomfortably miscast. Thus, the new film will come and go, find a few admirers of some scenes but will hardly replace, undo, or overcast the influence of Preminger’s version.
As for the dad, he is played by Claes Bang (“The Square”), and Raymond is as handsome as ever, taking young Cécile and his new girlfriend Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune) to his beach house in France. Cécile has no problems with her father’s philandering, given that he is a widower; she is outraged with him when he invites one of her mother’s close friends —then proposes to her a minute later-, Anne (Chloë Sevigny). Anne’s got nothing that can be considered as impossible to be Dad’s type, nor does Sevigny try too hard to persuade us. With an approach reminiscent of “The Parent Trap” (or perhaps a traditional Shakespeare comedy), Cécile forms a strategy to disrupt their marriage.
Earlier in the Bonjour Tristesse film when Seberg glances in a mirror and pulls an expression at the jealous pixie-cub head whom she assumes will later appear in the movie “Breathless” by Jean-Luc Godard, she says ‘It is not his fault that he has ceased loving you, it is your fault. You are pretty but spoiled, willful, arrogant and quite lazy.’ While Chew-Bose doesn’t spare Cécile, she is not reduced to this kind of psychological explanation. The invitation to empathize with the teenager is more pronounced, so that the bummer summer of the title seems to be less like a film and more like the teen’s experience of her regrets, her souvenirs, as her personal ones.
In so many words one of the focuses of the film is joining the characters in what some might think of as dullish engagement but what has very obviously and skillfully been done by the DOP Maximilian Pittner to sort of capture the strongest feeling of boredom and fashion in context – moments such as ‘Cecile drawing invisible letters on her boyfriend’s skin or sleeping on an orange mustard chair. Even how she spreads her butter on bread has some impact’.
Some will certainly be in the saloon of Sofia Coppola for example who, as Chew-Bose does, pays attention to sensations that other visualists often find elusive. There are echoes of “Call Me by Your Name” here as well in adolescent passion, Cécile’s and more adult interpretation of her actions. However, most fitting seems to be Jacques Deray’s “La Piscine” in which Alain Delon and Romy Schneider were viewed swimming underneath the sun about a decade after Preminger’s film.
For no good reason — and very many bad ones — Chew-Bose places her version into the modest present times (Raymond involves Cécile in a situation where she is told to throw her I-phone into the ocean at some point). This change at a glance makes absolutely no sense because it denies a sex revolution that was proposed by Sagan’s novel. Instead of being ahead of its time, the source material now feels old things. And Cécile’s flirtation with Cyril (Aliocha Schneider) who is practically a non-sexual object is scandalous only in its apparent limitations.
Leaving aside the signpost of contemporary times, “Bonjour Tristesse” is raised in the fashion of a quintessential 1950s film; almost like a wonderful escape from contemporary culture with its many mind numbingly dull actions and nostalgic elements. There are the colored tiles that scroll the opening credits. (it’s hard to beat those created by Saul Bass for the original) not to mention the interesting fashion and cars which seem to miss the point utterly of what Anne stands for (Sevigny wears a scarf on her head while McInerny has the privilege of modeling several obscene vintage swimsuits).
Why then is it that this particular icon, so representative of counterculture, is being cast as a faux scared cosmopolitan? It’s not a choice that sits easy, rather how Luca Guadagnino made the curious decision of placing Tilda Swinton in the remake of his film ‘La Piscine’. Directors become infatuated with such distinctive and audacious actors who dramatically miss the context in which they are placed and exactly how their eccentricity takes away the surrounded ethos of the tragedy directors are trying to portray in their films.
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- Genre: Drama, Romance
- Country: France, United Kingdom, Canada, United States
- Director: Durga Chew-Bose
- Cast: Mélodie Adda, Claes Bang, Nailia Harzoune
