Bonjour Tristesse Is Lovely and Unconvincing

The first rule of making a film of Bonjour Tristesse is that it must look splendid, and if nothing else, Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation achieves that. Gently updating Françoise Sagan’s generational 1954 best seller, Chew-Bose fills her frame with sun-dappled bodies and faces, tasteful outfits, elegant spaces, and the easygoing languor that comes with the seaside sojourns of the wealthy. When writers make their film-directing debuts, a question often hovers over the images: Do they have an eye? Chew-Bose clearly has it, and it will surely serve her well in future endeavors.

Oddly enough, where Bonjour Tristesse stumbles is in its storytelling and character psychology, the areas in which one imagines writers excelling. Part of that is the challenge of the novel itself. Sagan’s slender tale of the toxic bond between a 17-year-old girl and her playboy father was a literary sensation in its day for the way the author, 18 at the time of publication, conveyed the corrosive and self-absorbed carelessness of a teenager for whom people came to seem like toys to be played with and manipulated. Cecile (played here by Lily McInerny) is a student who refuses to study for her philosophy exams, but she nevertheless embodies the existential ennui of her times. Her father, Raymond (Claes Bang), has been bouncing from lover to lover ever since his wife died, and he’s now found himself in the awkward position of having invited two women to their summer getaway. He’s in the midst of a casually torrid romance with the beautiful, earthy Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), when into their lives arrives Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a well-known fashion designer who was also his late wife’s closest friend.

Those familiar with the story of Bonjour Tristesse will know it goes to some spectacularly melodramatic places. And it only really makes sense if one gets the central tension right. Raymond finds himself drawn to Anne on a deeper, unexpected level, which Cecile views as a threat to her own mysterious attachment to her dad and their easygoing life together. The maternal, responsible Anne insists that Cecile stick to her studies and even attempts to impose some discipline on the girl’s life. If the characters and their attitudes don’t convince, the narrative will collapse — because it’s ultimately quite ridiculous. It all works on the page thanks to the way Sagan captures Cecile’s blank, cruel boredom as well as her simmering obsession with Raymond. (Many speculated at the time about the story’s autobiographical elements, which of course only helped further the author’s notoriety.)

Alas, Chew-Bose plays things too coyly. Perhaps it’s because the mid-century milieu in which the novel operates — a world of kept women, of idle wives, charmingly lecherous businessmen, and a boozy, lilting frankness about such matters — feels somewhat distant to our more anxious and hyperaware times. Everything in the film has become so sublimated that it almost ceases to exist. McInerny and Bang are both competent actors — Bang, in particular, has given his share of great performances — but one never really buys them as a parent and child sharing a dangerous codependency. In some exchanges, they come off like total strangers. McInerny conveys Cecile’s nervousness but not her calculation or her muted savagery; she’s entirely too human, too relatable, too … normal. Maybe that’s the point, but it results in the film’s climax coming off as pointless and contrived.

That’s particularly unfortunate in this case, because Sevigny does wonders with the role of Anne, imbuing this outwardly confident and successful woman with an inner vulnerability that feels like she’s sharing a secret with the audience: Just watching her eat ice cream, we feel for her. In fact, Anne comes to such spectacular life before our eyes that this too contributes to the disappointment of where the film ends up.

Admittedly, I might be slightly biased. Back in 1958, Otto Preminger made a film of Bonjour Tristesse that might be among my favorite of the director’s films. Preminger, ever the maximalist, went in the opposite direction with Sagan’s vaporous narrative. His Cecile was Jean Seberg, lovely and poised in her chatty disaffectedness; Raymond was played by the reedy, charmingly caddish David Niven. They peppered each other with seemingly innocent kisses that eventually told their own twisted tale. And the performances laid bare the characters’ fateful silliness; their attitudes suggested a father who had never grown up and a daughter who was growing up all wrong. Preminger’s widescreen camera circled around these wealthy, careless, dangerous people like a force of destiny. Their Anne was Deborah Kerr, who brought such a glowing goodness to the part that she seemed doomed right from the start. (Sevigny’s Anne feels so much more like an actual person in comparison.)

Not everybody was down with Preminger’s operatic approach (which was very much of its time), though the French New Wave famously embraced it. Jean-Luc Godard once mused that his 1960 breakthrough Breathless, also starring Seberg, was a kind of sequel to Bonjour Tristesse — though, let’s face it, Godard said a lot of things. (François Truffaut did him one better, speculating that Bonjour Tristesse was a kind of sequel to Preminger’s earlier Saint Joan, which also starred Seberg.) Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.