Bonjour tristesse (durga chew-bose 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

DURGA CHEW-BOSE: BONJOUR TRISTESSE (2024)


CLAES BANG, LILY MCINERNY, CHLÖE SAVIGNY IN BONJOUR TRISTESSE

This beautiful remake is a little too perfect.

Bonjour Tristesse comes wrapped in Fifties gossip and glamor, a famous novel, the 1954 Paris overnight sensation by the 18-year- old "posh enfant terrible" Francoise Sagan, which revolves around a schoolglirl at the beach and her rich philandering father whose lives are rocked by the late summer visit of Anne, the late mother's friend. It was made four years later into an admired film directed by Otto Prememinger (see the recent Voice review by Nick Pinkerton). It had David Niven, Jean Seberg (now more remembered for Godard's iconic Breathless made two years later), and Deborah Kerr.

Happily, Chlöe Sevigny gets to play Anne in this new version. Sevigny is a wonderfully contained, confident, and cool actress who, besides acting, happens to be a model and have been a style icon, and a designer, which her character is here. (She's late to the beach, but it seemed odd to me that everybody else is so pale.) Unfortunately Sevigny, like the rest of the film, seems soigné to a fault. She is meant to be too cautious and self-conscious, even in the novel, but here not just she but everybody is analyzing rather than living. That sort of thing works better in French.

This Bonjour Tristesse isn't as sharply conceived as Preminger's, but it has its points. First of all it has Chlöe Sevigny, whose Anne is the main role. And that's last of all as well. Other actors are pleasurable to watch, particularly Claes Bang as the father, Raymond, and sometimes the partly charming, partly prickly Lily McInerny as Cécile, the narrator-daughter. Even Cyril, Cécile's boyfriend, who doesn't matter, is played by Aliocha Schneider, one of the five French acting Schneider brothers, who's loose-limbed and a good danser, and makes this boy seem never superfluous but a desirable accessory.

It has previously been remarked, accurately one fears, that this film is too perfect, too precisely calculated and tasteful. The rocky Cassis beach, the rangy house with its nice art; the cinematographer Maximilian PIttner's moments of well-placed darkness in the house. Those 'unexpected' interior shots, calculatngly avoiding the obvious or symmetrtical, are all so perfect you want to freeze-frame and admire them. The dialogue, all the bons mots and words of wisdom: you want to write them down.

"It's a lot for her. For you to trust her so much," Anne says to Raymond of his daughter, Cécile. "You sound so wonderfully old fashioned," he reples. "She won't stay close just because you give her so much room," Anne continues. "Be wrong sometimes; it's less lonely," he says.

I agree with The Movie Buff : the film is lovely to look at and Sevigny remains its greatest asset, but it winds up seeming "a beautiful yet hollow experience."

Peter Debruge wrote in Variety of these bons mots in the new film that they're "far too eloquent to have sprung from a 19-year-old’s head" (i.e., an 18-year-old's, as the book did) and that the film is (that word again) "ultimately hollow." Even the unexpected moments - and an injected extra character - feel carefullly calculated. So are the twenty-first-century cell phones, neatly included so as to be visible and used without seeming unduly intrusive.

The book felt like something enormously precocious but tossed-off, and this doesn't. Maybe next time the director will achieve something fresher and less perfect, grabbing a touch of spicy sprezzatura. As a calling card for all these actors, the Montreal-born director, and young cinematographer Pittner, this is fine, and it's a reminder, in case you'd forgotten, that the Côte d'Azur is a beautiful place.

Boonjour Tristesse, 110 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 5, 2024, and showed at a number of other festivals including Vancouver, Zurich, AFI, Palm Springs and Göteborg. It opens theatrically in the US and Canada May 2, 2025. Metacritic rating: 6̶3̶%̶ . Now 65%.