Situated on a tranquil beach somewhere in the French Riviera is a beautiful mansion, which serves as the summer home to Raymond (David Niven), a well-known Parisian aristocrat and man about town, who has a tendency to romance any woman who catches his attention. Accompanying Raymond on this summer sojourn is his daughter, Cécile (Jean Seberg), and his latest lover, the young and effervescent socialite Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), who is more of a companion to Cécile than mistress to her father. Unbeknownst to his two fellow vacationers, Raymond has invited another guest to their holiday home, which Cécile is delighted to discover is Anne (Deborah Kerr), her late mother’s best friend and someone who she has known all her life, but hasn’t seen for quite a while. Anne’s arrival is quite a challenge to her hosts, since she is not as level-headed and logical as they remember, based partially in the fact that she’s hopelessly in love with Raymond, who does express similar interests, but less as a long-term romance, and more as a brief passionate affair, which doesn’t appeal to Anne, who is searching for something more meaningful. She manages to coerce him into taking their burgeoning relationship more seriously, and he does momentarily commit to it, even making plans to get married and settle down. However, we soon learn that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and when he starts to find his gaze drifting away from the homely woman he is intending to marry, a new range of problems begin to take over the family, causing tension and tragedy to manifest and threaten to destroy what is already a very brittle set of relationships.

Otto Preminger is a difficult director to pin down. A filmmaker who demonstrated remarkable versatility throughout this prolific, lengthy career (being someone who seemed to be intent on directing film in every imaginable genre), he never quite developed a distinct style for the most part, constantly being seen as something of a journeyman director, albeit one with a very particular vision that comes through once someone has grown accustomed to his approach to the films he helmed. Françoise Sagan’s novella Bonjour Tristesse is a work of folkloric importance, since it was an insightful, heartfelt manifesto on love and individuality, written before the author had even entered adulthood. The contrast between the distinctively youthful Sagan’s book being directed by someone who had been in the industry for long enough to convincingly call himself a veteran, is not lost at all in Preminger’s adaptation. A book that has often been considered to be one of the few “unfilmable” pieces of literature, Bonjour Tristesse was going to be a tricky source to bring to the screen. However, while he may not have found a particular niche in an era where most directors were trying to define themselves by only a few artistic features, Preminger dared to provoke and go further than he had before – and this made him the perfect candidate to bring Sagan’s impeccable, beautifully poetic story to the screen. Bonjour Tristesse is not a perfect film, nor is it one that necessarily does everything it could’ve in terms of exploring the depths of the novel. However, what it lacks in conceptual insight it more than makes up for in execution, with the lush cinematography by Georges Périnal, the gorgeous dialogue (with Arthur Laurents doing very well in translating the novel onto the screen) and wonderful performance compensating for all the minor shortcomings that would otherwise derail a film such as this, turning it into quite a sumptuous, fascinating human drama.

The challenge when adapting a novel like Bonjour Tristesse is that Sagan wrote something so precise and unimpeachably personal, its difficult to gauge what the specific tone and intention behind many of her choices were. Literary works can either be very easy to adapt, or next to impossible, depending on how they function in terms of story structure. Bonjour Tristesse doesn’t follow any known patterns, and is instead an explosion of adolescent angst layered by a world-weariness, which made it such a cultural phenomenon. There were certainly several obstacles that stood in the way of Preminger turning this into a film, but accompanied by Laurents (who was certainly not a stranger to challenging material, considering the wealth of work he did as a writer for both the stage and cinema), Preminger was able to extract an abundance of meaning from a novel that is notoriously difficult to take apart and analyse. Perhaps the only weakness of this adaptation is its approach to the genre – we’ve seen many literary adaptations struggle when it comes to finding a specific tone, and when working with something that appears as loose and imprecise in its genre as Sagan’s novel, one can imagine the difficulty in finding a specific approach. It causes the film to have elements of a romantic comedy, a character-based drama and a psychological thriller, all being thrown into the film at several points, serving to work through Sagan’s particular ideas. This is one of the obstacles that tend to be evoked most commonly when it comes to bringing a story from the page to the screen, but Preminger easily circumvents this by surrendering to the laissez-faire nature of the source material, and just allowing the story to transpire organically, using Laurents’ writing and the impeccable actors to find the tone after the fact, rather than trying too hard to define the film from the outset, which makes a considerable difference when working with such challenging material. 

There are three very good performances at the centre of Bonjour Tristesse, each one having value both in isolation and in contrast with one another. Preminger had a special touch when it came to directing actors, doing enough to give them a challenge, while still showcasing precisely what it was that made them stars in the first place. The de facto lead of the film (despite being third-billed) is Jean Seberg, one of the most enigmatic, and sadly tragic, actresses of her generation. A performer filled with a particular joie de vivre that made her such a fascinating figure, her distinct combination of youthfulness and world-weary cynicism made her a profoundly interesting protagonist, showing Cécile as far more than just a precocious teenager, but rather as someone who was very much ahead of her time in all regards. David Niven by Raymond, her father and an eligible playboy who doesn’t let the ravages of middle-age distract from his ambitions to be known as the most desirable man in any room that he enters. The chemistry between Seberg and Niven is palpable, and they bring such an interesting approach to the father-daughter dynamic (to the point where the film has fun with the fact that we spend quite a bit of time with these characters before we are told that they’re father and daughter), and the film thrives the most when they’re both in their element. Deborah Kerr enters the film later on, but the moment she steps on screen, she is immediately captivating. As he did with Seberg’s youthfulness and Niven’s debonair charm, Preminger brings out Kerr’s best qualities and uses it creatively, both as a crutch for her performance, and as a means to challenge her as an actress. The epitome of the fragile, tragic rose, Kerr’s performance as Anne is very internal, which makes her gradual unravelling into jealousy and despair all the more harrowing – flashes of madness gradually become personality traits, until it finally erupts into an explosive series of emotions that lead to a very tragic ending, the image of her car being lifted from the sea after driving off a cliff being one of the most disturbing portrayals of a suicide ever committed to film. Kerr (and all the other actors) meet Preminger’s standards, delivering spirited performances that make Bonjour Tristesse a profoundly brilliant character-driven drama that doesn’t only need to rely on the script, but also the people tasked with bringing it to life.

The elements that make Bonjour Tristesse such a success are clear from the outset, although we might not realize it. Starting the film with a few minutes set in Paris, which is here shown to be a superficial, limited portion of the world (which is only made more evident by the film quite literally removing all colour from these sequences, filming them in muted sepia tones, and the camera work being very close to the actors, creating an uneasy sense of intimacy and despair), before cutting to the past, which is shown in glorious Technicolor, where the French Riviera has never looked more stunning than it did through Périnal’s camera. There’s a balance between the visual palette and the motivations of these characters, and the decision to make what is certainly a very bleak and harrowing character-study, into something as lavish and extravagant as this (with the film being only a few musical numbers short of a fully-fledged MGM musical, based on the visual styling and the tone for the majority of the film) was fascinating. Preminger knew exactly what he was doing with this material, and by playfully manipulating tone and intention, he creates something that appears to be adherent to a variety of genres, but always stopping just short of fully-achieving such distinction. It’s slightly too dour to be a comedy, too frigid to be a romance, and far too intimate to be considered a melodrama. Some may accuse Bonjour Tristesse of being a film that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, but if there is ever a work that celebrates the value of trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, then this is absolutely a very fierce competitor, since such risks work out extremely well with the conviction Preminger brings to the material.

Preminger had his work cut out for him when adapting Bonjour Tristesse, and while this may not be his towering masterpiece, it is definitely a film that shows what he was capable of doing when the material he took on had some meaning behind it, as well as being executed with the distinctive directorial precision that bound all of his films together. Regardless of the genre in which he was working, Preminger was entirely committed, and even when it didn’t meet expectations, or had many flaws, there is a sense of authenticity to his work. Bonjour Tristesse is a strikingly beautiful film that also carries a sense of genuine interest in penetrating beyond the confines of the genres it touches on. It’s a deceptively sleek, charming drama that ventures into a number of different conventions, adopting a variety of styles, all of which comes through with a very clear understanding of the material, which makes for incredibly compulsive, fascinating viewing that comes across as the work of someone who knew exactly how to command a viewer’s attention without resorting to the same hackneyed techniques that lesser filmmakers made use of to enrapture us in whatever project they were working on. Ultimately, this isn’t a film that makes its intentions clear at the start, and even at its most interesting, it still has a tendency to be rather aimless and disorienting if you’re not paying attention to the underlying message – but once we find our way onto the film’s wavelength, and are able to understand both its aims and intentions in telling this story, we’re immediately transported to that gorgeous home in the south of France, where we see this fascinating familial drama play out, all shepherded by a brilliantly versatile director who knew exactly how to keep it intimate when it was necessary, as well as playing to the rafters for the sake of bringing this iconic novel to the screen in an unforgettable way.