A wealthy man of leisure and his similarly carefree daughter find their lives changed by a woman of firm morals in 1958's Bonjour Tristesse. Based on a famous French novel and directed by Otto Preminger, the film successfully holds a dark mirror up to hedonism.
Cecile is played by Jean Seberg a couple years before she was in Godard's Breathless, and Godard has said that he regarded her role in Breathless as a continuation of this one. Both Godard and Truffaut liked her but I feel like it would be reasonable to mistake Seberg for a bad actress. I guess she was really just suited for a particular role, that of a capricious, psychotic, and yet not vicious, young woman.
All she wants is to maintain a life of constant partying on the Riviera with her father, played by David Niven. But his latest affair with a boozy French version of Marilyn Monroe (Mylene Demongeot) is interrupted when Deborah Kerr shows up as his old acquaintance, Anne. They soon become better acquainted, in fact engaged, at which point Anne begins to feel responsibility to Cecile and forces the girl to spend more time on her studies.
It's not like Cecile needs a career. Why shouldn't she and her father carry on as they always did? She argues with Anne that their old friends seem perfectly happy in their depravity. "Then why do they drink so much?" asks Anne.
Still, by the end of the film, it's debatable whether Anne's morals are true in themselves or if the tristesse, the sadness, that comes about comes more from Cecile and her father's particular affection for Anne. Kerr's role here is not so different from her roles in Black Narcissus, The Innocents, or Night of the Iguana. She had a real knack for playing women of firm resolution who are simultaneously, attractively vulnerable.
Bonjour Tristesse is available on The Criterion Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment