Holding a coral seashell up to the sun. A lover carefully, not recklessly, caressing your collarbone. Realizing your polo has been inside-out all along. Falling asleep in someone’s lap in the back of a car. Taking too many photos of the moon; of handsome men. Struggling to take off your late mother’s gold necklace behind your back, turning it around, instead.
These are the kind of fleeting, stray gestures that come to define the sensibility of Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, a new film adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954, first-person novel, more interested in using that well-known plot to filter its writer-director’s subtle, poetic cinematic perspective. As she writes in her 2017 essay collection Too Much and Not The Mood, Chew-Bose is drawn to things like the essences of words from another language for which English has no words, “because is there anything better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated?” But a narrative film cannot be constructed by indefiniteness alone, no matter how hard it tries to resist the conventions and confines of its juvenile source material.
The film opens with the close-up of a young man staring out at the sea—framed in a way that brings to mind the films of Angela Schanelec, Claire Denis and Lucrecia Martel—before he takes off his t-shirt, revealing a muscular back with thin, blond hairs shining in the sun’s glare. In the next shot, instead of giving us a point of identification—negating our expectations—we see Cécile (Lily McInerny) lying on the stones with a wrinkly striped shirt over her face, shielding her from the world a moment more. “Are you dead,” the young man asks, pulling the shirt across her face, so that it becomes a revelation, the way Satyajit Ray—a lodestar of Chew-Bose’s—does at the start of Pather Panchali: the score jolting awake the very moment Apu opens his eyes under the blanket, launching a period of growth, of becoming, of discovery.
Cécile, then, is the film’s centre, our heroine, an emotional current in constant fluctuation, whose morals are still in the process of solidifying. We learn, early on, that her mother passed away twelve years ago, that she plays solitaire with her charismatic father Raymond (Claes Bang), that she is discovering her sexuality with Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), and that she has no interest in anything to do with school in the summer. As soon as Anne (Chloe Sevigny), an old family friend, unexpectedly arrives on the scene, it almost immediately disrupts the balance that, along with Raymond’s otherworldly lover Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), they have created in their stony villa in the south of France; but Cécile soon comes up with a plan to restore the order.
It is also through Anne that Chew-Bose can express her approach to adapting the text, as when she shows Cécile her design sketches and confesses: “I count on these unthinking gestures or else the work becomes really boring. The moment things become forced, I question everything….If I create clarity, or meaning, I lose interest.” What are the unthinking gestures Chew-Bose conjures up here? Early on, for instance, after Anne re-enters the home, rather than cut the scene, Chew-Bose rests on the empty courtyard, the table replete with a breakfast spread and a newspaper that the breeze suddenly—magically—turns over, so that when Elsa arrives and begins reading, and Anne returns, the audience has been privy to a secret. “You are so alive to the smallest things,” Cyril tells Cécile; and where the film succeeds are these seemingly accidental moments where that sense of aliveness to the present, in a film so haunted by the past, by the absence of the dead mother whose presence was vague, is wholly embodied.
Where the film errs are the moments when it forces itself—as Anne says—to create clarity and meaning. From the dry, awkward, dialogue that will later have no bearing on the film’s conclusion—“Everything is about listening,” Elsa says; even though the climax of the film occurs as a result of sight—and the limited emotional range of McInerny, whose jealousy and sense of betrayal is never convincing enough to carry off the narrative turn the film wants to take, Bonjour Tristesse, for all its arcane pleasures and subdued expressions, is aesthetically dazzlingly yet never manages to create the stakes necessary to make us care, so preoccupied with the edges of the things that it estranges the audience. What hinders its potential even more is the constant mood changes prompted by the over-stuffed soundtrack and Lesley Barber’s score, which can sound like a rippling pastiche of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou or a quirky comedic sitcom. If only, one thinks, Chew-Bose trusted her images to build the tone.
One of the most telling scenes the film is when Anne fills up an ice-cube tray, an almost forgettable instance but one that immediately reminded me of a line from Too Much and Not the Mood, where it originated from: “If I’m experiencing panic brought on by someone who leaves me fainthearted, I picture that person carrying with caution a just-filled ice tray back from the sink to the freezer. That image, on its own, can sometimes get me closer to where I’m meant to be. Just beyond the jam. Less impatient to compare myself.” The ice tray scene, then, becomes a key to understanding Cecile’s sense of insecurity in the face of Anne, the way that she threatens her and requires a re-framing of one’s mind. It is acts like these that Chew-Bose inputs her own insights from years of close observation, to smuggle in the secrets from her personal archive, appropriating it for her own means rather than directly, plainly adapt a text, which makes one yearn for a film full of unthinking instances in which she sounds like herself; in which she’s free.
Bonjour Tristesse is now playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
