Bonjour Tristesse
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Movie Reviews of Bonjour Tristesse
Movie Review: Seberg: The Haunted Pixie
Summary: 5 Stars
Panned at the time of its release, "Bonjour Tristesse" stands up today as one of the more stylish and less hokey 1950's treatments of teenage angst & sexuality in changing times (it's more commercial counterpart would be the saccharine "A Summer Place" with Sandra Dee). Shot almost entirely on location at a villa on the French Riviera, director Otto Preminger's camera often encircles it subjects, follows them straight through rooms, up stairs and around porches, until you get a panoramic sense of really being there with the characters amidst the beautiful scenery. There's a sense of perpetual movement in the camerawork that makes "Bonjour" worth studying for its innovative cinematography alone.
Adding to the eye-candy factor is star Jean Seberg in her second film and second collaboration with Preminger (their first being the disastrous "Saint Joan" of the year before). Jean caught a lot of flack from skeptics who criticized her performance as "wooden" and "stilted", bedgrudging her rapid ascent to leading-lady status after having been picked from obscurity to play Joan of Arc. Preminger's "search for Joan" contest was not unlike today's "American Idol", with the instant success (and resentment) that its "winners" experience. On his TV show, Mike Wallace grilled her mercilessly about whether or not she thought she deserved to star in anything, firing accusatory statements at her like "you are a synthetic star", "your debut was a failure...what are you going to do if you fail again? What will it take for you to pack up your bags and go home?" As it happened, Jean met both Wallace's hostility and the challenges of "Bonjour Tristesse" with her customary good grace.
As Cecile, Jean adeptly essays a teenage girl, sweet of temperament but disporportionately enamored of her widowed father, played by David Niven. Cecile plots and schemes--with disastrous results--to eliminate Anne (Deborah Kerr) as the competition for his affections.
Compelling by her looks alone--dimpled and aglow with youth (and a decidedly lucky bone structure), Seberg nonetheless does more than just trade on her beauty--she carves something interesting from a character that could easily have been bland. The duplicitous Cecile, who is not quite as benign as she seems, needs just the right amount of lurking menace--more the result of immaturity than evil, and Seberg manages the balance commendably. Her inexperience shows through in spots, but as Francois Truffaut remarked of her performance, "when she is onscreen--and she is onscreen all the time--you can look at no one else." She had that cinematic attribute which trumps virtuosity; she is compelling. Ironically, it is in the easy scenes that she is weak and the histrionic ones where she shines. But she is never less than arresting, never boring, never banal. She glitters with star quality.
Co-stars David Niven and Deborah Kerr are excellent--Niven especially as the philandering but loveable father, and Mylene Demengeot as Cecile's comic girlfriend contribute much toward making "Tristesse" a funny, sad, and haunting picture. The sexual and moral (or amoral) themes are ahead of their time, perhaps influenced by the French New Wave that was just gaining momentum (and which would embrace Seberg as its female mascot after the release of Godard's "Breathless").
If you are in doubt of "Bonjour"'s ability to pack a dramatic wallop or 19 year-old Seberg's ability to render its message with depth and sensitivity--bear with it to the final shot, where Cecile, Macbeth-like, vainly tries to wash herself clean in a makeup mirror, her face a mask, betrayed only by the eyes filling slowly with tears of self-loathing for the damage she has wrought, until finally her pretty face cracks like a porcelain doll.
Movie Review: Alors!
Summary: 5 Stars
Some Bad Movies demand a response in the French style - every few minutes, you'll find yourself striking your hand to your forehead while shrieking, "Alors!" Just such a choice pastry is Otto Preminger's 1958 film version of Francoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse (which means, more or less, "Hello, sadness"), the filmmaker's second, and final, attempt to turn Jean Seberg into a star - they'd bombed a year before with Saint Joan. Pert, perky and as American as apple pie, Seberg was perhaps the last actress who could pass for an amoral, Parisian teen temptress whose incestuous feelings for her aging roue father - she calls him, ahem, "darling" - spell doom for anyone he seriously gets involved with.
The beginning of this howler, set in the "present," is shot--meaningfully - in black and white, the better to capture the stark ennui of Seberg's poor-little-rich-girl life. Out on the dance floor in a chic Paris boite, Seberg stares moonily into a camera and tells us in voice-over, "I can't feel anything...it isn't the same anymore. Nothing is." Sure, you've guessed that Seberg will also mutter, "Will I ever be happy again as I was at the beginning of that wonderful summer on the Riviera?" thereby cueing a flashback - shot, meaningfully, in color - but no one could anticipate that before this occurs, starlet Juliette Greco turns up to croak out the film's fall-down-funny title tune: "The street I walk is sadness/My house has no address/The letters that I write me/ Begin 'Bonjour, tristesse.'"
Alors!
Summering sinfully in a villa with her rich daddy-o (David Niven) and his mistress-of-the-moment (Mylene Demongeot), Seberg trills dialogue like, "Wait! Let's smell the day!" so sunnily she seems to have traipsed in from a Gidget movie. Into this cozy triangle wanders Givenchy-clad Deborah Kerr, who, as the world's foremost fashion designer, inexplicably has marital designs on womanizing, good-for-nothing Niven. In no time, Niven's romancing Kerr ("I've never wanted any woman the way I want you"). Demongeot hits the road ("I will not be treated like a wife!") and Seberg is forced to explain to us how she feels ("Part of me was angry, part of me was happy, all of me was excited"), since she's utterly unable to register any emotion on her blank face.
When Niven and Kerr start sleeping together, then announce they're engaged, Seberg is so jealous of Kerr - about whom she gushes, "She looks softer, moves easier... I wish I walked the way she walks now" - she literally jumps Geoffrey Horne, the hunky male starlet next door. Then, when Kerr reprimands her - "You should realize such diversions can end up in a hospital!" - Seberg goes bonkers at the notion of losing Niven and gaining a stepmother-cum-truant officer, and begins to plan Kerr's heave-ho. After sticking voodoo pins into her doll, Seberg tells us, on the soundtrack, "I actually spent days comparing the contestants for my father," while she chalks up a blackboard comparison of herself and Kerr in such categories as "Fun," "Chic," "Possessiveness" and "Flirting." (Tellingly, Seberg doesn't put "Acting" on the board.) Just in case we think she doesn't deserve to get dumped, Kerr suddenly gets prissy, denouncing Niven's alcoholic pals: "In the end, their only memories will be of hangovers!" Then, Seberg seduces Horne into feigning a romance with Demongeot, which - oh, don't ask - provokes Kerr into driving off a cliff into the sea.
Alors!
Back in the black-and-white "present," Seberg confides that she and Niven "have an unspoken agreement to never mention last summer" -- the very deal, we'd guess, they cut after finishing this film.
Movie Review: 'Brilliant!"
Summary: 5 Stars
This stylish film is one of Otto Preminger's best. The French New Wave has influenced him in his opening shots, but only on a visual level. This is pure Hollywood on ever other level. The melding of the two styles works perfectly and begins by setting the stark mood in stunning black and white widescreen shots of 1958 Paris. The present is painted in shades of grey and silver, where Cecile portrayed by the beautiful Jean Seaberg moves aimlessly thought her pointless upper crust Parisian life. Only when she encounters her father David Niven later in the evening does the past seep in on the edges of the cinemascope frame in vivid color and finally takes over moving us from the present to last summer on the Riviera. The device is used several times as we move from past to present and finally at the end of the film it creates a stunning effect once you know what suddenly happed to Cecile and her father last summer. The thing that changed everything forever and allows Preminger's camera to linger in the last frame of the film on Jean Seaberg as she wipes away the make-up from her perfect face. David Niven is perfectly cast as Raymond the aging (...) father of Cecile. He has the cool style and humor of a man who can't commit to any woman and treats his daughter like a playmate rather than his child. His particular talents as an actor are that he seems to be playing the "David Niven" character in most of his films but here in `Bonjour' as he often does in so many roles he makes a nice little twist on the "character". He catches you off guard to wrench his and the audiences emotions and prove once again what a good actor he is.
At first Deborah Kerr also seems to be playing her role by rote but it is just a ruse to set us up for her fall. As does Niven she too digs deeper in to her persona as Anne Larson and carries the film to its surprise ending. She is a joy to watch as a film actress and here she is particularly wonderful.
The French actress Mylene Demongeout is delightful as Elsa, Ramon's summer plaything. She is in fact `Brilliant!" in the role.
Geoffrey Horne is decorative and serviceable in his role as Cecile's beau who awakens her (...) .
Jean Seaberg who with her short cropped spiked hair in certain shots reminded me of Sharon Stone has that kind of blonde goddess look that Miss Stone possesses. She was only 19 when she made the film and in the hands of her director she presents us with a sensitive and spellbinding performance as Cecile. She is at once a teenager in turmoil and a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman. This is a delicate high wire act that the young Miss Seaberg executes with charm and elegance. She is festinating to watch and just right for the role.
The subject matter is even today a little shocking and indeed this is one of the films of the 1950's that put the sin in Cinemascope. Despite the restrictions of the day or because of them filmmakers of that time were challenged in ways they are not today. Challenged to be inventive and insinuate things that we were too innocent or too naive to know happen in the world. Those filmmakers knew that the imagination is more vivid and titillating than what they might show. It was good that the antiquated production code of the Hayes office crumbled in the 60's but with it's passing we lost a whole vocabulary in film. Here is a wonderful example of the meeting of the Movies and 50's cinematic innuendo that serves this delicate story to a tee. I think "Bonjour Tristesse" is `Brilliant!'
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.
Movie Review: When Silly Games Become Dangerous
Summary: 5 Stars
Seeing this film for the first time--Near its beginning I was laughing. Initially, "Bonjour Tristesse" seems dated. Cecile (Jean Seberg), is flitting from man to man diffidently (19 year old Seberg portrays a 17 year old character, going on 37). In Chapter 4 of this DVD, we see her facing the camera, dancing with a man, as she simultaneously narrates this scene in a bitter, hollow voice. One has to wonder "What is wrong with this girl? What has made her so heartless?" The action then shifts to the French Riviera, enticingly filmed in Technicolor; ultra-bright blues and greens--Even the olive-colored tiles in the bathroom of Cecile's bathroom are stunning. But something's off--Superstition hangs over the sunny Mediterranean like a shroud--The number 7 having particular significance in this story. The picture gets cooking about halfway through--Things start to unravel when Anne (Deborah Kerr), the new woman of Cecile's father, Raymond (David Niven), starts to impose her morally superior will upon amoral Cecile. Anne forbids Cecile to see Phillippe, a law student from the neighboring villa, as he will distract Cecile from studying for the philosophy exams that she has recently flunked. Cecile becomes furious with Anne; "Anne is prim and prissy and a prude and a know-it-all, and I hate her!" she exclaims while sticking needles into her doll. Cecile sets a trap involving her boyfriend Phillippe and one of her father's ex-girlfriends; Cecile calls upon "Jealousy the Green Eyed Monster" to do her bidding. The consequences of this plan end up being unexpectedly tragic, and Cecile and Raymond return to Paris, where they "Live in Limbo" together, going through the motions of life. Father and Daughter end up living a lie they cannot come to terms with, either within themselves or with each other. What makes this film work is its light, bubbly atmosphere of "fun" that is maintained throughout the film. The first half of the picture could easily be seen as fluffy, contrived, pretentious. But eventually this veneer is stripped away to reveal pain and denial of the characters--Their regret, remorse and tragedy. Only after the film's end did I realize that this atmosphere had been created to contrast the grim reality of the subtext. The final scene of the picture is chilling in the manner of "The Twilight Zone". Additional highlights include (1) the crisp, clean, black and white cinematography of Paris; and (2) the original trailer for "Bonjour Tristesse", included on this DVD, that gives nothing away.
Stephen C. Bird, author of "Hideous Exuberance: A Satire"