The 1958 version of “Bonjour Tristesse” seems to be everything Hollywood seems wary of these days: a notoriously misogynistic film director’s interpretation of a book written and written by a French teenage girl. “He used me like a tissue and then threw me away,” Jean Seberg said of director Otto Preminger. Well, get out your tissues for a more sensitive (and elegant) version, one that asks: What would an adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse” look like if a woman were interpreting Françoise Sagan’s words? Better yet, how would it feel?
Montreal-born writer-director Durga Chew Bose delivers an impressionistic narrative, focusing on tangible details: the way the Côte d’Azur sun hits the skin, the comfort of sitting in front of an open fridge on a hot summer night, the smell of your father’s aftershave. Chew Bose’s debut, while promising, is ultimately hollow, offering the audience a vicarious vacation to the South of France, where vivid sensory memories accompany words too eloquent to have come out of a 19-year-old’s head.
Chew-Boss has a more generous sense of why Cecile, played by Seberg in the previous film and now by Lily McNearney, wants to interfere in her father’s love life, but it’s all so weak—and so bizarrely poorly cast—that the new film is a blockbuster, finds a few fans and then fades into oblivion, doing little to replace Preminger’s version.
Claes Bang (“The Square”) plays Cécile’s father, played by the typically handsome Raymond, who takes Cécile and his new girlfriend, Elsa (Nailia Harzon), to a vacation home on the French Riviera. Cécile accepts her widowed father’s womanizing behavior, but feels threatened when he invites her over—and almost immediately proposes to—an old friend of her mother’s, Anne (Chloë Sevigny). Anne has nothing on her father’s side, and Sevigny makes no effort to convince us otherwise. Like a Parent Trap (or perhaps a classic Shakespearean comedy), Cécile hatches a plan to break them up.
In the former, Seberg stares into the mirror, studying her reflection as a jealous, short-haired blonde who will star in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and says, “It’s not her fault that he doesn’t love you anymore. It’s your fault. You’re spoiled. Willful. Arrogant. Lazy.” While Chiu Boss doesn’t let Cécile off easy, she resists such a reductive psychological reading, inviting us to identify with the teen until the ultimately disturbing summer becomes more personal, as if her regrets and memories are our own.
The film spends a lot of time relaxing into moments that, however lazy they may seem, are carefully framed (by the talented cinematographer Maximilian Bittner) to evoke the most elegant forms of boredom: Cécile scrawling secret messages on her boyfriend’s bare back, or dozing in a low yellow chair. Even the way she butters her toast is memorable.
Some will no doubt recall the work of Sofia Coppola, who, like Chew Boz, focuses on sensations that other directors find elusive. There are echoes of Call Me by Your Name here, too, both in Cécile’s teenage passion and in the interpretation of her actions as more mature. But the most apt reference is Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, in which Alain Delon and Romy Schneider enjoy a poolside swim about a decade after Preminger’s film.
For no good reason—and for countless other bad reasons—Chio Boss sets her version in the near present (Raymond orders Cecil to throw her iPhone into the sea at one point). This is to inexplicably reject the sexual revolution that Sagan’s novel anticipated. Instead of being ahead of its time, the source material now feels dated, and Cecil’s semi-chaste flirtation with Cyril (Alyosha Schneider) is scandalous only in its improbable restraint.
Beyond the contemporary signs, “Good Morning Sad” feels like a mid-20th-century musical—a chic oasis of modern life, filled with dull manners and old-fashioned details. From the colorful tiles that appear below the opening credits (it’s impossible to rival the colorful tiles originally designed by Saul Bass) to the vintage costumes and cars (Sevigny wears a scarf on her head, while McNearney sports several vintage swimsuits), the song doesn’t seem to understand what Ann represents.
But why choose a counterculture icon like Sevigny to chastise society? It’s a somewhat paradoxical choice, as when Luca Guadagnino cast Tilda Swinton in his remake of La Piscine. In his admiration for such unique and daring stars, the filmmakers fail to realise how out of place they are in the context, or how their presence distracts from the intended tragedy of their films.
