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Bonjour Tristesse
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Editorial
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Cool and introspective, Otto Preminger's sleek, stylish Bonjour Tristesse is one of his most understated films. Jean Seberg stars as a spoiled teenager who acts with a high-society sophistication beyond her years, and dapper David Niven is her playboy father, going through young female playmates like socks. Flitting through the French jet set and comparing conquests, they summer on the gorgeous French Riviera, where mature fashion designer Deborah Kerr enters their lives and wins Niven's heart. Seeing an end to her lifestyle, Seberg plots an end to the relationship with equal parts conniving ruthlessness and juvenile prankishness, too self-absorbed to even consider the brutal results of her actions. Told in flashback from a sleek but shadowy black-and-white Paris, the film melts into the vivid Technicolor of memory. Seberg's voiceover narration is arch, but her impish, often petulant performance is perfect, as is Niven's flippant, womanizing bachelor father (Preminger lets their curious, flirtatious intimacy hang like an unanswered question and a nervous subtext). Kerr's middle-aged working woman seems almost puritanical compared to the irrepressible travelers, but under her rules and limits lies an honest concern for a "child" who believes herself an adult. Preminger's camera prowls through the drama just removed enough to be respectful, and intimate enough to get under the characters' skin. Like the best of his dramas, there are no heroes or villains, only complex, flawed, achingly sympathetic characters. --Sean Axmaker
Stylized rather than stylish
Review date: 2006-10-11 Rating: 6 out of 10
The use of black and white versus colour to reflect the desert of her present life compared to her previous golden existence is notable, true. The story is simple, almost simplistic, and the film joggles because of the alternately stiff or almost sing-song delivery of lines. It shows more like a stage play than a film. But it's more the era in which the film was made rather than poor acting, I think. It's worthy, but still worth watching: Cecile as the gamine social butterfly is luminous and mesmerizing; Raymond as the feeble, immoral bon vivant, pathetic. The film, for all its faults, is rather better made and has more wistful charm and punch (cf. the final scene) than some of the drivel one pays to see in the cinema these days.
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Reviews
Goodbye good life, Hello sadness
Review date: 2005-08-10 Rating: 10 out of 10
From the monotone, monochrome opening of "Bonjour Tristesse" we immediately learn that Cecile is a young woman ill at ease in the world. In spite of her wealthy, apparently carefree lifestyle, where the champagne flows freely and the male admirers are equally as rich and effervescent - nothing is able to touch Cecile's heart. She is, as the black and white imagery suggests, locked in a world of sadness, surrounded by her "wall of memories". The film then shifts into technicolour, as Cecile (Jean Seberg)recounts how, only a year earlier, as a
seventeen year old, her life was happy and filled with possibility. We follow the story of how she and her father (a thoroughly rogueish David Niven) have been, in one summer on the South of France, abruptly confronted by the consequences of their casualness towards the feelings of other human beings, and how they have both come to pay the ultimate price for their selfish "live now pay later" mastercard philosophy of the heart.
Stylishly filmed, "Bonjour Tristesse" is a movie which will haunt you. Not merely because of the poignancy of lost innocence which Jean Seberg's performance depicts so well, but because it places its fingers on the wound all of us carry with us - the moment, when we cannot quite say, exactly when childhood slipped away.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Mylène Demongeot
Jean Seberg
Geoffrey Horne
David Niven
Deborah Kerr
Creators:
Jean Seberg (Primary Contributor)
David Niven (Primary Contributor)
Georges Périnal (Cinematographer)
Otto Preminger (Producer)
Helga Cranston (Editor)
John Palmer (Producer)
Arthur Laurents (Writer)
Françoise Sagan (Writer)
Director(s):
Recording label: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
EAN: 5035822024731
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL,
Release date: 2005-08-01
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Audience rating: Parental Guidance
Region code: 2
Running time: 90 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1958
Language: Arabic (Subtitled)
Language: Dutch (Subtitled)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: French (Subtitled)
Language: Greek (Subtitled)
Language: Hindi (Subtitled)
Language: Hungarian (Subtitled)
Language: Italian (Subtitled)
Language: Portuguese (Subtitled)
Language: Spanish (Subtitled)
Language: Turkish (Subtitled)
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: French (Dubbed)
Language: German (Dubbed)
Language: Italian (Dubbed)
Language: Spanish (Dubbed)