Bonjour Tristesse

“I’ve been young for so long, and so old for longer.”  — Durga Chew-Bose, from Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)
 “Certain phrases fascinate me with their subtle implications, even though I may not altogether understand their meaning.” –-From the novel Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)
In 1955, eighteen-year-old Françoise Sagan’s debut novel Bonjour Tristesse, about a teenager and her widowed playboy father vacationing on the French Riviera, enjoyed three months atop the New York Times bestseller list. Otto Preminger’s lush CinemaScope film adaptation followed in 1958. The director’s clinically cool approach was tepidly received, though Jean-Luc Godard, an admirer, quickly cast its star, Jean Seberg, in Breathless (1960).
A new adaptation of Sagan’s 71-year-old novel was both an unexpected and ideal choice as the directorial debut for Montreal writer Durga Chew-Bose, known for her wonderfully original book Too Much and Not the Mood, a collection of evocative prose pieces that are too intuitive, poetic, and personal to be categorized as essays. Intellectually incisive, Chew-Bose’s writing is also sensual and cinematic; in her New York Times review, Kate Bolick praised Chew-Bose’s “visual-verbal synesthesia.” It’s no surprise that Chew-Bose, an ardent cinephile, would become a film director.
And considering how astutely she writes in Too Much and Not the Mood about the passage from childhood to adulthood, the dynamics of friendship, and the particularity of father-daughter relationships, it shouldn’t be a surprise that she found a way to connect so deeply, and bring so much emotional complexity to Bonjour Tristesse. She also brings a distinct filmic sensibility. Moving between stylized theatrical dialogue, and a keenly observant approach that emphasizes moments of pregnant silence, there is more than a touch of Chantal Akerman in the film’s aesthetics and a fearless willingness to avoid easy answers.
Chew-Bose eliminated the first-person voiceover of the novel and film, which focused on Cecile, the young protagonist (played to perfection by Lily McInerny, as a young woman who is never quite as mature as she feels herself to be), and greatly expanded the presence of the other characters, most memorably Chloë Sevigny’s Anne, the sophisticated Parisian designer who has everything under control except her impossible love for Cécile’s alluring and immature father Raymond (played by Claes Bang), and Nailia Harzoune’s Elsa, who is little more than Raymond’s plaything in the novel, but is a deeply fascinating character here. Chew-Bose’s adaptation delivers both the surface beauty that the novel describes, and the deeply felt tristesse that lies beneath.
Bonjour Tristesse screens tonight in New York as  the opening night film in First Look, at Museum of the Moving Image

Filmmaker: What was your relationship to the novel, and then to the film? I feel that this is mainly your version of the novel, but it’s hard to ignore the Preminger film. 
Chew-Bose: I love Otto Preminger’s film. I’d seen it more recently than I had read the book, when it came time for me to adapt it to the screen. Film Forum was screening it when I was still in New York, and I went with a friend and was just mesmerized. And then I think soon after, maybe, like a year later, my producers reached out to me after reading my book [Too Much and Not the Mood], and said that they were really hoping to secure the rights to make a new adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel, and wanted to know if I’d come on board as a screenwriter.
It wasn’t a book that I had read when I was younger. It didn’t really speak to me, it didn’t influence me in any way. At first I was sort of confused as to why they thought I would be a good fit. But one thing I’ve learned is you have to trust other people’s visions, because what they see is the future a little bit, and if you’re not listening for it, you’re gonna miss out. And I’m not talking about ambition or opportunities. You’re just gonna miss out on that magical thing if you stay closed. So I eventually agreed to come on board, and I reread the book. I never rewatched the film. I guess I’m someone who, if I have an assignment, then I start looking towards the text with a different eye or ear. I noticed rhythms and images, and I wanted to make sure that my version was going to be additive, but not with a sense of ego. I didn’t want my paw prints to be all over it, but more like, if a moment in the book or a line spoke to me, that was enough for me to know, okay, this has to be in the movie for some reason. So, yeah, we really tried to stick with the book but I do feel like our version, Otto Preminger’s version, and the original book, were all part of a stream.
Filmmaker: And when did you go from becoming screenwriter to writer-director?
Chew-Bose: Like every film, there’s many lifetimes. We went out to other directors who had passed. Sometimes it was a question of timing. I think there was also trepidation, because it had been adapted already, and the book itself is so beloved. So was this a cursed project? I wrote a pretty unorthodox script that was quite visual, that had camera direction. And I’m someone who loves production designers, loves costume designers, and I would send my producers texts like, “You know who’d be really great for this?” And I think without knowing it I was sort of presenting myself as a potential director to my producers. They felt it was clearly alive to me, even though I had never directed. Maybe this will be the next step for me.
Filmmaker: One of the key decisions you made was to do away with the book’s first-person narration, which Preminger’s film holds onto.
Chew-Bose: That was a big decision that we made fast. There’s something heavy-handed about narration. To me, when it works, it’s almost invisible, inaudible somehow. And I was really excited by the challenge of how to create, in a visual medium, that sense of interiority, without guiding your audience too much. I had no experience as a director. I only had experience as an audience member, and I’ve always loved when I can tell the director really trusts their audience, that they’re asking something of their audience. And if you’re narrating, I think you’re asking a little less of them. And so one way that we worked on it, to create that feeling that’s in the book, is the actual writing was a bit “off.” It was like, is this how someone talks, or is it like the memory of the most elegant woman you ever met that one summer, how she might say things? It was like capturing the world a little bit through Cecile’s point of view, but in this elevated or heightened way, because it’s not really how people talk. And I think that was kind of my way of getting into her head.

Filmmaker:  When you talked about the additive process, what I latched on to in the movie is how you expanded the role of the other women, Elsa and Anne. You can imagine a feature film for each of them individually, and you purposely leave a lot unexplained. You do get a sense of their interiority, but you’re not quite sure how to feel about them. Raymond, of course, is an important character, but the real focus is on these three women.
Chew-Bose: I was interested in the idea of not really getting to know anyone. I’m not super moved by relatability, which is maybe a more contemporary way of deciding if one likes art or not. That personally doesn’t interest me. I like how people are remembered. And so I think there was like a level, temperature-wise, of coolness that I wanted to kind of coat each woman with, and then abruptly have moments where their guard is down, or where they say something that is very peculiar, but sort of is their entire mantra. And it doesn’t have to be profound. Anne has a lot of these lines where she categorizes women in her life by simply how they dress or how they talk or how they do something. And at times I would strip it all of language and just have scenes where you have three women eating apples differently, and that’s enough to show how they’re kind of very different and alike at the same time. So it was sort of, how do you create intimacy without necessarily always creating proximity? And sometimes it was as simple as being alone in a room with a woman for an extended scene where you don’t see a lot happening, and your discomfort in that makes you feel sort of protective of her.
Filmmaker: The breakfast scene is so memorable, and hardly a word is said. One of the strongest aspects of the film to me is its interest in silence and dead time. There’s even a line in the film where one woman observes, of another, “Your silence is different.”
Chew-Bose: I think it kind of goes to this idea of not satisfying the sort of natural rhythms people might expect from storytelling. If you hold a moment for half a second longer than one expects, something can happen. And what is happening might not necessarily be between the characters. It could be between the audience and their relationship to the characters, because they are now freed from our world, where we’re like, “What’s next?” and momentum. They’re being told, “sorry, we’re not going to give that away to you for free.”
Even the camera in that scene, we placed it, and my cinematographer walked away from it. I said I want this to feel like a play, like they enter from stage left, there’s one door in and out, and we just watch what happens. And in some very kind of movie-magic ways things happen. The newspaper page turned on its own because there was a breeze. The way that Chloe walked in her low-heeled shoe was a sound we thought was wonderful in that scene, and we reused it in the Paris coda to bring her back. And so it was almost like, for me from just like the movie-making aspect, it was also an exercise in letting things happen and listening to the movie, letting the movie happen to you, instead of, like, forcing it. Yeah, that’s how I felt comfortable as a director.
Filmmaker: Having an openness to allowing these moments to emerge, I think could be scary for a first-time director.
Chew-Bose:  I’m sure there were moments where I was scared, like, “Is something happening or not?” But I think I learned very early in the process, even before being on set, all the way back to writing and casting and losing financing and getting financing. It’s just a series of false starts making a movie, and that also exists on set, and I knew that what I feared the most was a sense of satisfaction in production, like, when, the question, like, do we have it? I would sometimes be like, “I don’t know, but let’s move on.” I truly believe if you stick to your vision, if you have trust in the people you’re working with, you are making something. And then when I ended up in post-production with my editor, we found the movie and it found us. And I think a lot of the ways in which that felt like a natural rhythm was because I’d kind of forgotten making it, was surprised by it again, and I wasn’t attached to too many parts of it, and I listened a lot to my editor.

Filmmaker: I’m curious about what the working atmosphere was like on the set. I mean, you found this amazing villa to film in. What was it like working there day to day?
Chew-Bose: We made a conscious decision of really being at the villa for as long as we could and built the schedule around that so everyone was familiar with it. Just so that anyone walking through it in a scene, it looked like they were actually spending the summer there, they knew where the forks were, you know, and so that was really important. That was where my education as a director was the most steep, wondering how to react in a very controlled environment when you don’t have a lot of time and you’re asking these artists to be vulnerable. And sometimes that was really scary for me, and I kind of leaned into that fear and just like, cloaked myself in confidence. And then other times I think I honestly, like drifted away in certain moments. And I think that was also helpful, because you don’t want to hold on too tightly to everything.
You know, with Claes, we had talked about the character for a long time leading up to him arriving for prep. And so we had talked about everything from father-daughter relationships to what kind of father he had been. But then also, I talked to him about how father-daughter films, just as a film lover, were so important to my viewing experience. And the range was Paper Moon to Contact; it wasn’t always like what people might assume was the canon. I just think father-daughter relationships are really cinematic.
And one line I used with him a lot was that I just want Cecile and Raymond to feel like the last ones left, or like two cowboys. And I think that was because we didn’t have a ton of time to rehearse. And this goes to the rest of the crew and my heads of department, I think people just learned how I speak. Once you have those codes or those languages, you kind of just let the person interpret it how they want. So  what does a cowboy mean to Claes might be very different to what it means to me, but he knows what I was talking about. And I was like, this will be a cowboy scene with the moon in the sky, and they’re sharing a cigarette, and they’re like, the last ones left. He was like, “Got it,” but I didn’t know what he was gonna do with that, but I just expressed it in this way. And I was very grateful to be the least experienced person on set by a country mile, and so I listened to what everyone else’s instincts were, and it’s really a beautiful group of artists who made this film. And I’m very humbled by that.
Filmmaker: When I think about the dynamic between Raymond and Cecile, they both have a quality of being kind of immature or childlike. A lot of the tension in the film is between sort of wanting to, like, remain a child and having to grow up. And part of that is expressed in the film by looking at bodies, and emerging sexuality. I just wonder if you could talk about that theme, which is so crucial.
Chew-Bose: I think that Raymond was thrust into single parenthood in a way that he wasn’t prepared for. And instead of trying to figure it out, he avoided figuring it out. So this film is like his coming of age too. But I also didn’t want to have a relationship where the daughter raised the father either. Like, I didn’t want there to be too much upsetted-ness. There are moments where Cecile expresses that she wasn’t crazy about this dynamic. But I also think some people just are, you know, dealt different cards. And in some ways, she’s had a great childhood, because she’s just been exposed to adults and that’s so fun and glamorous and complicated, and her version of voyeurism isn’t on a screen, her version of voyeurism is listening to conversation in the next room.
But yeah, I think that the ways in which they kind of challenge each other and question each other, and the way that Lily performs Cecile is sometimes a little mischievous and feral and out of control, and he’s maybe charmed by that. So I didn’t want it to be sort of like parent-child, who’s the parent, who’s the child, that just didn’t really interest me. They were kind of in tandem.

Filmmaker: And there is a sense with each of the three women that they all have their own sense of power, which partly comes from sexual power, but, but in very different ways. So I just want to make sure we talk about Elsa and Anne. I think with Elsa’s character you really made her a much deeper character than she is in either the book or the film.
Chew-Bose: Yeah, in the book, she’s kind of negligible. And so I really saw it as an opportunity. What a gift I get to write this whole character who is impossibly cool, deeply intelligent on a soulful level, sort of unbothered by little obstacles in life, is, in some ways, a big sister and is a lover and has a way of sort of explaining the world to Cecile. And yeah, she was sexually so powerful, and so subtle and discreet in some ways. And Neilia Harzoune, who plays her, just had so many little qualities that are really delicious on screen. So it was also really fun to work with her. And similarly, Chloë is very focused, and brought to Anne a gentleness, which was in the script, but Chloe did it in a way that always warmed me from the inside, which I thought was really special, and maybe for Raymond’s character, reminded him of the past a little, and she brought that so naturally. And also, Nathalie Richard’s character, Nathalie, is not even really in the book, but I like she’s kind of like my ode to cinema, because she’s like the character that I love in every film that comes in briefly has a really important scene, kind of, is the skeleton key to the whole film, disappears and then, like, reappears at a really pivotal moment. And to me, that was just like candy to write and to cast and to work with this actress that I admired.
Filmmaker: But Chloë Sevigny is so good here. She brings a vulnerability, even though you always know she’s the smartest person in the room.
Chew-Bose: Yeah, you want to protect her sometimes, but not like she needs our protection at all.
Filmmaker: Beauty and wealth are so integral to the film. There’s great pleasure in looking at everything, but you also capture the undercurrent of sadness that is, of course, in the title of the book. Could you talk about what you wanted the audience to take away about this?
Chew-Bose: I think that escape can bring a sense of melancholy. It’s really funny. I was with some friends at the Palm Springs Film Festival, and around like, one in the afternoon, we’re having a date shake, which I’d never had before (they’re pretty local), and we’re just sitting on a bench, and I looked at my friends and said, “This is the sad time of the day.” We’re literally in the desert. It’s so beautiful. We’re enjoying each other’s company, just people watching, and there’s a sadness there. And maybe that’s just very dramatic, but it’s very much what I wanted to create with this film, which is that sad time of day. It’s like right after supper or right before supper, or when you hear people enjoying themselves in the next room and you can’t really get your energy there, or you’re being ignored on a beautiful day — sort of like these moments of contradiction when you’re in paradise. That really interests me. I think there’s an insecurity as humans when we’re like, why can’t I feel what that other person is feeling right now? It’s definitely something I felt while reading the book, because the character is constantly volleying between so many mixed feelings, and it can almost give you whiplash. But if you’re comfortable with sadness on a sunny day, then it doesn’t give you whiplash. And I think I’m comfortable with that. So it was something I tried to create with this film, and it’s partly why the camera’s still a lot, and we’re never really like following our characters. There’s no handheld, because there’s something about the stillness that feels a bit sad.
Filmmaker: I’m not going to spoil anything about the ending, but there’s a big surprise in what happens with Cecile. In terms of taking liberties with the book, did you need to deal with Françoise Sagan’s family or estate?

Chew-Bose: Yeah, her son, Denis Westhoff, has been a huge champion of the project. He’s an executive producer on the film. He read the script. He was really excited when I came on board as director. He visited the set. He loves the film. He’s told us that he feels like his mother would have felt like this is the version she wanted in the world. That was really touching, the kind of blessing you hope to get for your project. And I honestly think the liberties I took came from a place of feeling like I deeply understood the text. They weren’t liberties that I took in order to solve a problem or make it my film, or pressures I felt to modernize it. They were liberties that felt in line with certain rhythms of the book. So in some ways, there are real departures, but I truly believe they’re kind of in there already in the book.
Filmmaker: Yeah, they never feel like they’re there to placate the audience.
Chew-Bose: We did take a lot of chances, but it’s worth it.