A cascading slant of coastal daylight betrays the futile dangers of vacation time in Durga Chew-Bose’s sensual, stilling, and elegiac rendition of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel of the same name. In this sun-soaked yet moodily cavernous adaptation, summertime sadness is a formative, virginal strain of sorrow, “a strange melancholy,” or “a silken web, enervating and soft,” as Sagan once penned in her opening chapter. Set in the moneyed and secluded French seaside, Chew-Bose’s cadent debut feature illustrates with sensory attention the entanglements of inertia, the restlessness of white escapade, the secret wounds of adolescence, and the lingering minutiae of visitation, hospitality, and grief.
Unlike the voiceover-led and timeline-flitting character study that was Otto Preminger’s 1958 vibrant Technicolor adaptation, the sly strengths of the Montreal-based literary and personal essayist’s (Too Much and Not the Mood) nautical bildungsroman lie in its meandering present-ness. Vacationing in the south of France, cloistered, doted-on 17-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her widowed, charming father Raymond (Claes Bang) are joined by Raymond’s latest lover, the young, free-spirited dancer Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune). When disciplined, elegant, American-born, Paris-based fashion designer Anne Larson (Chloë Sevigny) — a rather close friend of Cécile’s late mother and of Raymond — pays an unexpected visit to their idyllic villa, Cécile is forced to contend with a competing flood of nascent pleasures and envies. Kinships rekindle while intimacies are put to the test.
Accompanying the opening credits with close-up shots of Mediterranean tilework, Chew-Bose’s loosely faithful retelling intimates a colorist’s ballad, in turns conceptually abstract and mundanely sublime. Porcelain grids painted in a mosaic of glossy ginger, blueberry, rose, salmon, and quetzal tones expand into sparing but decorously styled interiors. Aglow in the deft production design of François-Renaud Labarthe (Stranger By The Lake, Personal Shopper) are echoes of the false but florid utopia of Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and the primary-toned austerity of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris. Coveted textures of striped pillowcases, embroidered bedspreads, and lilac beach towelettes conjure the leisurely but menacing mise-en-scène of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, encoding a touchably noirish thrill in this coming-of-age tale of filial memory and mortality.
Ensconced in Elias Ludovic’s eerily, sibilantly pleasurable sound mix is Cécile’s interior sensorium, affording an atmospheric gravitas to the writer-director’s own delectably microscopic yet vaporous prose. The result is a work of lonesome languor, which sparkles more in its conch-like sonic finesse than in its tonally consistent, if somewhat uninventive, plotting. Imbued in tasteful floral arrangements, in thickets of trails and mazes of shrubbery (reminiscent of fecund routes in Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest and lush weeds in Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee), in intentional but sparse mirror shots, is an unnerving air, a midday longing, a faraway tide, that effectively troubles the film’s lulling luminescence. Accenting each scene is afternoon birdsong, a sedate breeze, and to be sure, the parting, cleaving, and wading of water, rippling as elemental witness to Cécile’s slight presence.
By turns pensive and peacocking, McInerny’s Cécile is adrift from Jean Seberg’s “amoral young girl.” “She’s imagining what she looks like to us,” remarks Elsa to Raymond as both gaze lovingly at Cécile, who testily dips her toe in the water, angling her hip to submerge one ankle in, and then the other, with a hesitant delicacy, “to present herself for the moment when she wants to be seen.” In writing her lead heroine, Chew-Bose integrates habitude with knowing depth: Cécile applies electric blue eyeshadow on her upper lids and takes multiple selfies before curling into a midday nap. Cécile unsuccessfully tries to take pictures of the moon from her phone. A dog-eared, pink paperback of Colette’s seminal volume The Complete Claudine in hand, she is casually introspective, observant, almost in tryst with her surrounding, motherless quietude, but verging on nervous recklessness.
It is during the sly stupors of fragile domesticity that Chew-Bose winningly crystalizes the pathos of Cécile’s innocent harms. This is partly due to the film’s nimble and absorbing distinction between the nubile heroine’s dynamics with both the grown women who capture Raymond’s and, by extension, her own complex affections. Harzoune’s Elsa (brunette, balletic, breezy) and Chloë Sevigny’s Anne (orderly, mindful, poised) could not be more different; but both encircle the orbits of this father-daughter unit, seeking some semblance of solid familial ground.
While Elsa enacts the part of sisterly girlfriend, Anne assumes the role of surrogate mother (she sternly asks Cecile, “how did you do in your exams?”) to varying success. While one bites straight into the crunchy rind of an apple, the other carefully slices its flesh with dexterous ease into svelte slivers (not to mention, pineapple chunks, knifed into squares). Elsa’s manner reverberates in the way Cécile twirls in spontaneous dance one afternoon or sits cross-legged and barefoot on a chair or lazily spreads a stick of butter directly onto toast. Anne’s comportment similarly subsumes into Cécile’s: first Cécile practices pushing her shoulders back; then starts slicing her apples with wifely precision; she scrapes sand gently by her pointed tip of shoe; she dyes her hair blonde, wearing it in a supple, downcast bun — a spectral likeness of Anne.
The image of urbane, professional, chic Anne’s entry marks a subtle but crucial declaration, an undeniable selling point of this film. Unlike Preminger’s feature, where Cécile has the unquestioned position of lead narrator, Chew-Bose’s version affords Anne an arguably meatier participation. With an ebbing stylishness, Maximilian Pittner captures Anne’s point-of-view shots from the driver’s seat of her vintage convertible, imaging with symbolic sweep the unpredictably winding, hilly road to and from Cécile and Raymond’s summer abode. Scored by Lesley Barber’s transportive, orchestral interludes, these lush captures foretell and bookend her liminal importance, her absent presence, her careening returns, in Cécile’s life.
Nodding to the Givenchy-tailored, poppily monotoned cocktail dresses and copycat denim shirts in Preminger’s adaptation, costume designer Miyako Bellizzi’s eye distinguishes Anne from the rest by way of the prim flow and contained but mobile structures of her silhouettes. Dressed in an olive green button-down shirt, tucked behind a pleated, eggplant-mahogany skirt, Sevigny resists facial capture in her introductory shot (similarly, in a Hitchcockian nod, the back of Cécile’s lover’s head, a local French boy played by Aliocha Schneider, gazing into the horizon, opens the film).
Sevigny’s performance is a candid honing of Deborah Kerr’s self-possessed portrayal in the 1958 adaptation. Her pulsating composure and commanding warmth pack a sinuously detailed, calculating, and careful turn. She admittedly also has the best lines in the film, laden with starry impact, and bettered by her own seasoned gravitas. While flipping through the animate strokes of her cutting room drawings, chaotic and ripe with imagined taffeta and tassels and florals, she confesses to Cécile that these uncharacteristically “free, unthinking gestures” are essential to her otherwise proper tailoring. “Sometimes real love looks lonely,” she says one night, aiding Cécile in her wounded processing of her father’s rakish romances, while coolly lighting her a cigarette. “Everyone looks vulnerable in socks,” she comments like an afterthought with a felt but imperceptible chuckle. In one scene, she gifts Cécile an heirloom outfit. “Wear it in good health,” she pauses, her candor more parental than anecdotal, “that’s what my mother would say.” Sevigny’s line readings flit between whisper and order. Her Anne assumes a muted scorn, thinly veiling a desire to be a different kind of woman. When her fear of naps due to sleep paralysis is revealed in jest at a social gathering, Sevigny politely smiles, nervously adjusting her earring, craning her neck in a rare but bashful instance of vulnerability. Chew-Bose seems aware of the parasocial meaning of Sevigny’s star persona. She trades our millennial nostalgia for the indie sweetheart and runway fashion’s It Girl for a grown couturier who studies her surroundings like endless yards of embroidered cloth. Each eyeline is a smash; and so the myth and legend of Anne Larson haunts, nurtures, triggers, the scenic ecosystems of the familial premise of Bonjour Tristesse.
Seemingly an ode to the longing and loneliness lodged in the father-daughter unit of Yajisuro Ozu’s Late Spring, Chew-Bose’s paean shines more in her suturing of the mother-wound into the mind games of girlhood. It’s no surprise that the latter thematic prevails as the rousing coda of her work, enacting suspenseful surrender in the scenes shared between Sevigny and McInnerny. Here, the writer-director emerges as a historian of the maternal artifact, as it were, and ultimately an auralist, recording the lyrical within the granular. One wonders, can this obsession to momentary detail and familial gesture eat into itself? Parsing through the vacuums of Cécile’s interior worlds raises unanswered questions circling the film’s holidaying depressives — in particular, Raymond and Cécile’s socio-economic status, which enables this expatriate escapade. Unlike in Preminger’s film, there are no other visitors or occupants in their home, no help, no housekeepers, no blue-collar staff, nor migrant workers in sight, not even in conversational mentions. This bars a chance at shading, coalescing, the unknowing cruelties, the lumbering guilt, the wounded abandonment, of Chew-Bose’s lead heroine. But what the writer-director’s debut lacks in class curiosity it makes up for in precisely knotty directorial tendresse; in symmetrical, funereal immediacy; in narrating the end to an indelible summer.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
