Viewers of Durga Chew Bose’s directorial debut, Bonjour Tristesse, are greeted by sweeping ocean views and streaming sunlight at a beachfront villa. The beauty creates a setting that is almost too good to be true—the perfect setting for summer romance, youthful exploration, and also, somehow, something dark and disturbing.
“Bonjour Tristesse” will premiere on September 5 at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where Chew-Bose will also receive the TIFF Emerging Talent Award presented by Amazon MGM Studios at the TIFF Gala on September 8.
Based on the controversial 1954 novel of the same name by Françoise Sagan, who was just 18 when she wrote it, the film tells the story of young Cécile (Lily McInerney) and her widowed father Raymond (Claes Bangs) spending the summer in the South of France with his recent partner, Elsa (Nailia Harzon). Their seemingly perfect vacation is disrupted when Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Cécile's parents, comes to visit.
Chew-Puss’s performance has been only slightly transformed for a modern audience, a deliberate decision as well as Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott of Babe Nation Films, the project’s executive producers. When Nolan and Tapscott first approached Chew-Puss to adapt the film, initially as a writer only, the trio agreed that the women of “Bonjour Tristesse” were “very modern” indeed.
“My first step toward adapting this book was trying to find a way that I could be a part of this book,” says the author of Too Much and Not the Mood and co-founder of Writers of Color. “There are a few women in the original book that spoke to me and that I fell in love with for different reasons. From a purely writing standpoint, it was tempting for me to feel affected by these three women—Cecile, Elsa, and Anna—in separate ways.”
The Montreal-born director adds that she had ample time to sketch out her vision, and overcome any first-time directorial nerves, as it took Nolan and Tapscott just three years to secure the rights to the novel, and nearly eight years overall to make the film.
Chiu Boss is grateful for having charming, original characters to work with and star actors to bring her versions of them to life. One particular scene captures the chemistry they find with each other, as the three women eat breakfast together. Hardly a word is spoken. Instead, we learn more about them through the smallest gestures, like how they eat fruit or where they choose to sit.
“That was probably one of my favorite days on set,” Chiu-Bos says. “We wanted to shoot it like a play… We would sit on the benches and watch these women in the morning. I loved that day on set because there was something about letting the actors act and keeping the camera still, which is exciting for me as a director.”
Chiu-Bosi also thanks her crew for trusting her vision.
“We shot for 30 days in Cassis. [France]“It was a bit difficult, in Marseille. It takes a lot of trust in the crew. I come from Montreal. I’m not French. This is a beloved French book. I’ve never stepped on a set,” says Chiu Bos. “It takes a lot of people, a lot of artists, a lot of different ways of working to make a cohesive film and to end up in post-production feeling like we’ve achieved a level of cohesion, for me, I’m really proud of that.”
