It’s a curious project to remake in the 2020s — Françoise Sagan’s slim scandal-smash 1954 novel, published when she was 18 and less than a decade after the end of WWII, pseudo-naively skewering as it does the haute Euro-bourgeoisie of the day from a narcissistic teenager’s perspective. Not to mention the big-budget 1958 Otto Preminger filmization, which gave beleaguered teen Jean Seberg her nakedest moment in American movies. In both iterations, Bonjour Tristesse was a racy dust devil of its time; what, exactly, the project had to tempt us today, in our post–White Lotus swirl — not as a period film but in an updated form — is far from clear. The new version, a first film by Durga Chew-Bose, is lovely to look at, and beguilingly analytical in its details, but ultimately an irrelevance, an almost chaste tale of sublimated desire that can’t seem to raise its own temperature.
Chew-Bose, an acclaimed Canadian essayist with one book and scant film experience, may have her own reasons — certainly she’s into the gorgeous surfaces, as we hang on the Côte d’Azur with petulant teen Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her suave widower dad Raymond (Claes Bang), the two of them forming an indulgent, doting unit. They’re not French (Canadian, maybe?), it’s summer, Raymond has a gorgeous local girlfriend, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), and that’s life, in a lazy swoon of wine, cigs, dress-ups, and beach trips. Cécile has coupled with another young tourist, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), but nothing much is at stake except the Mediterranean light turning the stonework golden. Into this idyl comes Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a wary, secretive, buttoned-down fashionista who used to form a troika, in their youths, with Raymond and his now deceased wife. Soon enough — in fact, suddenly — Elsa is cast out (offscreen), and Raymond and Anne announce to Cécile their plans for marriage. Thinking like the child she still is, Cécile takes this as a threat (particularly when Anne urges her to study for the fall term) and decides to plot against the union, and against Anne. Bien sur, tragedy results.
Sevigny’s expired downtown cool is curdled into middle-aged self-loathing.
That synopsis evokes more of Sagan’s book than Chew-Bose’s film, which is oddly distracted by food and fabrics and McInerny’s skinny frame holding up bathing suits. For one thing, many of the key dramatic and revelatory moments are skipped over, or happen offscreen. Cécile remains merely a pouty modern teen to us, and it’s not all McInerny’s fault — there’s no open door to her thinking. For another, it seems Chew-Bose has misread both Sagan and Preminger to a crucial degree — at no point do we understand Cécile and Raymond’s life to be one of aimless, empty decadence, as Sagan had it, swaddling the whole petty scenario in the sackcloth of critique. Instead, it looks like they’re on holiday, and lounging unproductively in the sun is exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. Sagan’s scathing social portrait, managed in a quick dialogue-heavy read that shouldn’t take an adult more than an hour to finish, left a dent in the ’50s, but today Cécile’s dilemma feels trite, and Chew-Bose seems to know it, maximizing instead the aspirational Riviera vacation porn and the tactile experience of cutting fruit and trying on clothes.
Working with a Cinemascope frame, Preminger let his looming visual canvas make the statement, and in his hands, Seberg’s Cécile (like Jean Simmons’s psycho gamine in Preminger’s Angel Face six years earlier) edges into immature sociopathy. (Neither filmmaker has recourse to Sagan’s first-person adolescent voice, which floats the novel.) Chew-Bose’s movie instead feels uninvested in whatever the characters decide to do. The casting is hit or miss: McInerny is a sullen egret with a glowering Amanda Seyfried gaze, and has little help in giving Cécile a third dimension; memories of Seberg’s scared eyes and steely smile do not fade. As the OG Raymond, David Niven had a blithe, implacable insouciance well-suited for stupefying a plangent teenage mind, while Bang seems merely self-servingly cool.
Deborah Kerr, as Preminger’s Anne, naturally registered as the haughtiest and tightest of British rectums, which is what made her bottled sexuality practically leak through her seams. (It was a well-used quality; see 1953’s From Here to Eternity, 1961’s The Innocents, and 1969’s The Gypsy Moths.) Sevigny has something different: The actress’s expired downtown cool is curdled here into middle-aged self-loathing; the prospect of marriage barely cracks the decades of unhappiness baked into Anne’s face and flat voice. You wonder why Raymond would opt in, frankly, but that was Sagan’s point — we, and Cécile, are out of the loop. The private pain Sevigny quietly radiates doesn’t seem to belong wholly to Anne, and also doesn’t seem to be an energy this first-time director knows what to do with. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.