Search - Bonjour Tristesse on DVD

Seberg: The Haunted Pixie

Scott Coblio | West Hollywood, CA United States | 06/27/2005

(5 out of 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."