In her book-to-screen take on Bonjour Tristesse, writer Durga Chew-Bose crafts a lush atmosphere as meticulously and stylishly as she did in her 2019 essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood.
It’s not easy to adapt one of the more beloved pieces of 20th-century literature, and Chew-Bose had the additional shadow of Otto Preminger’s 1958 existing adaptation, which starred Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, David Niven, and Mylène Demongeot, to contend with. But the first-time director was undaunted, seamlessly translating the text to the modern day with the finesse and precision one of her characters uses to cut an apple, and bite it off the knife’s edge.
“I think any story told from the POV of a young woman trying to sort through the turmoil of coming-of-age will always feel modern to me,” Chew-Bose told the New York Times in a conversation about the film.
I’d first read Françoise Sagan’s 1954 bestseller Bonjour Tristesse in college when I, like its 17-year-old protagonist, Cecile, was learning more about how others perceived me — and how I could control or influence that perception.
As I clicked through the IFC Center portal to purchase tickets, I was seized with a protectiveness for Cecile. I feared the film would stumble over some of the pitfalls that haunt stories depicting a young girl’s blossoming sexuality. What I loved about Sagan’s novel was the way she captured how visceral and high-stakes life feels for a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, which makes sense considering she was just 18 years old when she wrote it.
Chew-Bose’s version picks up right where Sagan left off, meeting the teenage protagonist where she is, and making space for all that she feels and believes. From the jump, the male characters settle into the backseat both literally, in the widely circulated key art of Chloë Sevigny driving a convertible with the top down, and narratively, immediately gaining my trust.
When I arrived at the screening one blustery Tuesday, it had been pouring rain all day. As I sat back in the plush purple seat, I felt my pants’ damp hem rest against the top of my ballet-flat-cased foot. At first, I was curious how someone who had previously only expressed herself with words would direct such a visual, visceral story. Yet from the film’s opening credits, I was immersed in a vibrant world of blushing skin, never-ending sea, and deep shadows cast by buttery sunlight.
In my rain-soaked state, I was transported to sunny France. The kaleidoscope of color and tones is soundtracked by an equally rich aural landscape: the sound of coffee poured into an expectant mug, the gravely crunch of rocks under a slow gait, the ever-present lull of waves badgering a beach. Just as she did in Too Much and Not the Mood, Chew-Bose embeds words in a sensory ecosystem.
Cecile (Lily McInerny) is spending the summer with her father Raymond (Claes Bang) and his dancer girlfriend Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). Their days coast by; if you didn’t see them gather around a twinkly dinner table or gulp down fruit in the sparkling morning light, it’d be impossible to tell that time had passed, in a way that resonates acutely with being on vacation from school.
“You’re both very good at spending time,” says Elsa to Raymond about the father-daughter duo at one point.
Cecile develops a relationship with neighbor Cyril (Aliocha Schneider) — their limby bodies sprawling across glistening rocks in a private cove, making out and whispering things about themselves that they’ve never shared with other people. She gradually becomes more and more aware of how she is seen by the rest of the world. As Elsa describes, while she and Raymond watch Cecile tiptoe along a pebbled shoreline as it’s licked by gentle waves, “She’s imagining what she looks like to us,” to which Raymond recoils, bemoaning the idea of his daughter being ogled. Elsa stresses a distinction that twinkles throughout the rest of the film: “I said seen, not looked at.”
As a viewer, I drifted along from scene to scene as if carried by a soft afternoon breeze. I found myself captivated by the simplest, slowest moments — Cecile dishing cards on a tiled table for a game of solitaire, Raymond soothing a freshly laundered sheet over a bare mattress, Cecile fumbling with her necklace’s clasp at the nape of her neck — as only happens during a lazy summer day.
Change in the weather
Raymond, Elsa, and Cecile’s idyll is interrupted by Anne’s arrival. Anne (Sevigny) — an old friend of Raymond’s and Cecile’s mother, who passed away years ago — is a successful clothing designer living in Paris. Her presence strains the trio’s wandering pace with an exacting precision: she slices a pineapple from top to bottom with a ferocity and rigor that is both terrifying and sensual. Anne brings the same decisive approach to her interactions with Cecile.
The two are clearly close, but in the way a mother and daughter can be: their intimacy and familiarity provide a shelter, but can just as quickly turn sour. Tensions arise as Anne pushes Cecile to take things more seriously, urging her to spend less time with her boyfriend in favor of studying ahead of the fall semester. Cecile is frustrated by Anne’s tightening grip, but how much they love and see each other throbs like an uneasy heartbeat throughout their stand-offs.
Anne and Cecile’s rapport unearths the film and its protagonist’s depth. It sets up how the female characters observe, mirror, and manipulate each other’s behaviors in ways that ultimately reflect back on themselves — and propel the film towards its dramatic finale.
When Anne becomes romantically involved with Raymond, her friendship with both Cecile and her late friend become knotted. Elsa transitions from being Raymond’s girlfriend to Cecile’s playmate (in both age and demeanor) and co-conspirator. Even Cecile straddles roles and performances; she’s Raymond’s daughter but also his equal—he insists on treating her more like a friend than his child, heaping her with freedom and trust. At one point, Cecile teases apart a pair of tangled cord earphones, which is how it sometimes feels keeping track of the characters’ relationships to each other.
The bonds and boundaries between all three women are nebulous, ever-changing, and dichotomous, and with Cecile at the web’s center, the result is an accurate and true portrait of the way we emerge and are reborn when coming of age, oftentimes thanks to the women around us setting an example.
McInerny delivers a nimble, crushing performance as Cecile. Sevigny’s inhabitation of Anne, too, left an impression on me. The Oscar-nominated actor plays both sides of her character — her steely, in-control exterior and lost, vulnerable interior — so thoroughly, and with so much love. It’s impossible not to feel for either character immediately.
The woman’s voice
The complex and authentic portrayals of women at different stages makes sense: Chew-Bose was brought on by independent Toronto producers Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott to write the project because they loved how she put images to words and they wanted to center a woman’s voice in their retelling. The writer’s draft was so exacting and note-filled that other directors declined the project as they felt the script already had a directorial vision.
In many ways, you can’t help but wonder if Chew-Bose is plagued by the same push and pull of the desire for control as Anne is. After all, the title of Chew-Bose’s 2019 collection was inspired by the closing line of Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, which describes Wolff’s desire to write freely, unencumbered by the claustrophobia and restraint of editing herself in real-time. While for the most part, Chew-Bose’s direction falls into an elegant rhythm, at times her precision clashed with the film’s breezy setting in a way that was almost distracting or stiff.
The attention to aesthetics in some ways cannibalized the plot. When Cecile attempts to sabotage her father’s new relationship with Anne by engineering fake rendezvouses between Elsa and Cyril, I was not convinced of either the veracity of the plan or the stakes that demanded it. Part of that could be because I was not totally sold on the relationship between Raymond and Cecile.
Their relationship is positioned as one of maturity and equity, but they speak to each other like strangers, save for a line so wonderful it made me want to cheer in the quiet theater: When Anne asks Raymond why he’s not more worried about Cyril and Cecile’s relationship heating up, he tells her Cyril is “skinny like a boy from a few summers ago.”
While I may not have been as invested in the plot, Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse captures the careless cruelty and heightened melodrama of being a teenage girl with subtle nuance. Her balanced script, the dazzling cinematography, and breathtaking performances make for a delicious and thrilling debut, and with two projects already in development, I can’t wait to see what the breakout director does next.
