Bonjour Tristesse

Bonjour Tristesse
by Otto Preminger

Bonjour Tristesse
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DVD Cover Information

Actor: David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Geoffrey Horne, Jean Seberg, Myl?ne Demongeot
Director: Otto Preminger
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Portuguese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Japanese (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-12-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures

Movie Reviews of Bonjour Tristesse

Movie Review: My Kiss Has No Caress
Summary: 5 Stars

Juliette Greco is perfection as the aging nightclub singer at a chic Paris boite, who sings to strangers night after night of a "street with no address." Irretrievably ravaged by time and perfidious love, Greco gives the part nearly everything she has; in her excellent Givenchy gown she bespeaks chic even as she allows emotion to tremble through her quack of a voice. As she sings the haunting title track, Jean Seberg is twirling around on the dancefloor simultaneously drinking Greco in and obsessing about her own memories of a colorful, blue-splashed summer on the French Riviera, the summer in which the mystic numbers "7" and "e" combined to form a summer of death and disaster.

Preminger is superbly understated here, his direction of Seberg assured and yet improvisatory. Some have criticized the way that Seberg, Niven, and Kerr never even try to sound like French people, and some say that the heavily accented English of the fourth lead, Mylene Demongeot, sounds like gobbledegook and makes her co-stars seem even flatter. None of them is actually convincing, and Niven and Kerr are oddly miscast, but all of them are great in their own lights. Kerr is believable as a dress designer, Niven sort of believable as a girl's best friend kind of dad, though neither of them seem sexy enough for their parts. Maybe in real life David Niven was some sort of super playboy but I'm just not feeling it here. Why didn't they just hire Jimmy Stewart if they wanted a palsy kind of older actor to be Seberg's father? She seems like she's in love with him, or does she just feel responsible for his happiness since the mother's death? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and to discover that she had "accidentally" killed the mother, but we never get that story, maybe in the sequel?

What's great about the movie--beyond the main cast? Saul Bass' title design has got to be among his very best: the pattern of gold coins and crosses moving along a black screen like stars in the night sky, gradually being supplanted by red hearts and blue waves, and finally resolving themselves into the famous line drawing of Juliette Greco's crying face--OMG, you will feel like you've died and woken up in France.

Geoffrey Horne as the boy next door, especially the scene where Cecile musters up all her courage and runs to his house, skips through the hallways like a thing possessed, and then pauses outside a door. She throws open the door and you see a dimly lit room and Geoffrey Horne asleep, face down, on a single bed, the whole room lit up by the eerie, glowing white of his incredibly revealing underwear. Va va voom, no wonder she jumps on that law student!

Also the color design of the film, how the present is in black and white, but the flashbacks in color. The first, Juliette Greco scene,is especially impressive in this regard as Seberg, haunted by the past, is glimpsed dancing over the shoulder of her partner, until shards of color (blue) bombard her in triangles stripped into the negative (I guess) that finally overwhelm her and propel the film directly into the past, Must be taken from those Jazz cut-outs of Matisse; this sequence is a direct ancestor of Kylie Minogue's Riviera-like videos for "Slow" and "On a Night Like This." In fact the Kylie-Rutger Hauer relationship in the "On a Night Like This" clip definitely smacks of the Seberg-Niven one here in BT. Maybe I'm overthinking this.
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Summary of Bonjour Tristesse

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

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