The 1958 version of “Bonjour Tristesse” is everything Hollywood seems to be wary of these days: a notoriously mean, allegedly misogynistic filmmaker’s interpretation of a book written by and about a French teenage girl. “He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away,” Jean Seberg said of director Otto Preminger. Well, get out your hankies for a more sensitive (and plenty chic) take, one that asks: What might an adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse” look like if it were a woman interpreting Françoise Sagan’s words? Better yet, how might it feel?
Montreal-born writer-director Durga Chew-Bose offers an impressionistic retelling, emphasizing tactile details: the way the Côte d’Azur sun hits the skin, the relief of sitting before an open icebox on a hot summer night, the smell of Dad’s aftershave. While promising, Chew-Bose’s attractive but ultimately hollow debut offers audiences a vicarious vacation to the south of France, in which vivid sense memories are accompanied by words far too eloquent to have sprung from a 19-year-old’s head.
Chew-Bose has a more generous sense of what motivates Cécile, played by Seberg in the earlier film and now by Lily McInerny, to intervene in her father’s love life. But it’s all so wispy — and so weirdly miscast — that the new film will do the rounds, find a few admirers and then fade to obscurity, doing little to supplant Preminger’s version.
Cécile’s dad is played by Claes Bang (of “The Square”), whose Raymond is dashing as ever, bringing Cécile and his latest fling, Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune), to a vacation home on the French Riviera. Cécile accepts her widowed father’s womanizing ways, but feels threatened when he invites — and almost immediately proposes to — one of her mom’s old friends, Anne (Chloë Sevigny). Nothing about Anne corresponds to Dad’s type, and Sevigny makes no effort to convince us otherwise. Taking a page from “The Parent Trap” (or a classic Shakespeare comedy perhaps), Cécile hatches a plan to break them up.
In the earlier film, Seberg stares into the mirror, studying the reflection of the jealous pixie-cut blond who’d go on to star in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” and says, “It isn’t her fault he doesn’t love you anymore. It’s yours. You’re spoiled. And willful. And arrogant. And lazy.” While Chew-Bose doesn’t let Cécile off easily, she resists such a reductive psychological reading, inviting us to identify with the teen so that bummer summer ultimately feels more personal, as if her regrets and her souvenirs were our own.
So much of the film is spent simply relaxing in moments that, however lazy they may feel, have been meticulously framed (by gifted DP Maximilian Pittner) to evoke the most fashionable sense of ennui: Cécile tracing secret messages on her boyfriend’s bare back, or else snoozing in a low mustard-yellow chair. Even the way she butters her toast is memorable.
Some will surely be reminded of Sofia Coppola’s work, focusing as Chew-Bose does on sensations that other directors find elusive. There are echoes of “Call Me by Your Name” here as well, in both Cécile’s adolescent passion and the more adult interpretation of her actions. But the reference that feels most apt is Jacques Deray’s “La Piscine,” which found Alain Delon and Romy Schneider basking beside the pool about a decade after Preminger’s film.
For no good reason — and myriad bad ones — Chew-Bose sets her version in the near present (Raymond instructs Cécile to toss her iPhone into the sea at one point). Doing so inexplicably rejects the sexual revolution that Sagan’s novel anticipated. Instead of being ahead of its time, the source material now feels dated, and Cécile’s all-but-chaste flirtation with Cyril (Aliocha Schneider) is scandalous only in its unlikely restraint.
Contemporary signposts aside, “Bonjour Tristesse” plays like a midcentury mood piece — a stylish oasis from modern life, loaded with listless behavior and retro detail. From the colored tiles that appear beneath the opening credits (it’s impossible to compete with those designed by Saul Bass for the original) to the classic fashion and cars (Sevigny wears a scarf on her head, while McInerny models several vintage swimsuits), it doesn’t seem to understand what Anne represents.
Why cast a counterculture icon like Sevigny as a severe cosmopolitan scold? It’s a slightly jarring choice, as when Luca Guadagnino injected Tilda Swinton into his remake of “La Piscine.” Enamored with such unique and daring stars, their directors fail to grasp how out of place they seem in this context, or the way their presence distracts from the intended tragedy of their films.