At the beginning of “Bonjour Tristesse” – based on the 1954 novel previously adapted into a film in 1958 by Otto Preminger – Elsa (Nailia Harzoune) and her boyfriend, Raymond (Claes Bang) take in Raymond’s 18-year-old daughter Cécile (Lily McInerny) as she overlooks the French seaside. She’s standing in that particular way teenagers do: trying to look nonchalant, and in the pursuit of that endeavor, hyper concerned with how she comes across.
“She’s imagining what she looks like to us,” Elsa whispers to Raymond.
This adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse,” written and directed by filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose, is about just this. While Françoise Sagan’s novel and Preminger’s movie are about a young woman coming to terms with her own selfishness, Chew-Bose’s film is more about that time in a young person’s life when they must decide who they want to be – how they want the world to see them.
Chew-Bose achieves this ever-so-slight twist in the meaning of “Bonjour Tristesse” by placing more importance on the relationships that Cécile has with the women around her, rather than the one she shares with her father. Evoking the bright colors and summer ennui of Éric Rohmer, “Bonjour Tristesse” marks a strong feature debut for Chew-Bose, showing off the director’s visually expressive style and filled with great performances. While the narcissism of the source material still lingers in this new adaptation (after all, what teenager isn’t just a little bit of a narcissist?), somehow, Chew-Bose has wrung from it a sensitive and sharp coming of age story.
Cécile plans to spend her summer ignoring responsibility, opting to laze the day away with her laissez-faire father and Elsa, or spend time with her new beaux Cyril (Aliocha Schneider) rather than devote any attention to her studies. Cécile, Raymond, and Elsa have created a safe, sparkling, fantastical bubble for themselves during this summer on the French Riviera, uninterested in anything reality has to offer. But when Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Raymond and Cécile’s late mother, shows up to join the party, the bubble inevitably pops.
“Bonjour Tristesse” feels more in the vein of Rohmer’s brand of summer languidity (if you need a more recent example, think Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name,” or “A Bigger Splash,” which is based on another French film that slots nicely into this space, “La Piscine”) than it does Preminger’s more stringent, albeit, very beautiful, take on the source material. The hallmarks of summer are evident at every turn – a red bathing suit strewn carelessly over a wooden chair, a paperback haphazardly left splayed open, face down.
Cécile’s days are unhurried, almost sluggish, and yet every image Chew-Bose chooses is remarkably expressive and detailed. She spends time on the lingering looks between characters, or on the face of the listener rather than the speaker, gauging their reaction to the information being shared. On Anne’s first morning at the house, she and Elsa each eat an apple for breakfast. Elsa chomps down on hers, while Anne meticulously slices away at the apple’s flesh with a knife, neat and precise in her movements. When Cécile joins them, she begins to bite into her apple before catching a glimpse of how Anne eats hers. Cécile slows her chewing down thoughtfully. In moments like these, which are plentiful throughout “Bonjour Tristesse,” you could watch the movie with the sound turned off and still know exactly what each character was feeling or thinking – a beautiful marriage of visuals and performance.
Cécile loves how impossibly chic Anne is, but this part of her – the sharp, exacting part – Cécile bucks against. Cécile’s relationship with Raymond is about as “Gilmore Girls” as it gets. He doesn’t treat her like a child – sharing cigarettes with her, letting her have the run of the house, do as she pleases – and she doesn’t treat him like a parent – calling him Raymond, taking a vested interest in his sex life. Early in the film, Elsa walks in on Raymond and Cécile playing solitaire together – famously, a one person game. Elsa sits off to the side watching them, confused, but willing to let it slide.
Part of the reason Raymond and Cécile like Elsa is she doesn’t intrude on the strange, toxic co-dependency that they’ve built for themselves. Anne does. What’s worse for Cécile, as Raymond becomes more and more enamored with Anne, he lets that intrusion slide. And with Anne in charge – Anne, who wants Cécile to focus on school and more important things – Cécile’s days of lazing away on the beach or making out with her hot French boyfriend are numbered.
In the 1958 Preminger film, Cécile’s (played by Jean Seberg) reaction to Anne and Raymond’s relationship, and therefore Anne’s sudden power over her life, feels fueled by a childish desire to continue living a diverting, carefree lifestyle. In this film, Cécile’s anger stems more from her desire to be an adult and how she understands what, exactly, that means. Her father has more or less refused to parent her under the guise of “treating her like an adult,” but that lack of parenting has stunted her growth, leaving her unaware of the responsibility adulthood brings. Again, Chew-Bose demonstrates this disconnect to us visually multiple times, including a gorgeous shot of Cécile sitting on the floor in a designer dress Anne brought her, barefoot with her toes curled up under her, her shoulders set in slumped, teenage posture – a girl playing dress up.
Cécile is obsessed with the idea of knowing herself, and what’s needling about Anne is how Cécile can both aspire to be her and hate how young she makes her feel at the same time. She bristles against Anne’s implications that she’s not grown up enough to handle herself, but at the same time, she can be self-aware of her own limitations. Elsa represents a different type of womanhood, a looser, more flippant version, that while more familiar to Cécile is still a little alien. When Elsa cuts her hair short, Cécile muses, “Do I know myself well enough to cut my hair?”
She might as well be asking, “Which one of these women do I want to be?” In another break from Preminger’s adaptation, Cécile defines herself through her relationships to the women around her rather than the men. In the 1958 film, Cécile is thinking about herself, yes, but also constantly considering how each action will affect her father. In Chew-Bose’s adaptation, Cécile might consider her father’s feelings, but – despite the fact that Claes Bang has never, ever been hotter in a movie – Raymond himself is far more tangential to the story. However much her father treats her like an adult, it’s only when Cécile begins to consider the women around her that she actually starts to grow.