BONjOUR TRiSTESSE 1954/2024

“Je me disais qu'il s'enfuyait comme le temps, que c'était une idée facile et qu'il était agréable d'avoir des idées faciles. C'était l'été”

“I told myself that it was flowing away like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thought; for it was summer.”

I’ve rediscovered my love of this book after watching Durga Chew-Bose’s mesmerising 2024 adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse. In 2013, I received a runner up prize in the first Prada-Feltrinelli Prize for my short-story Slow Summer, born out of my feeling for this novel.

Published in 1954, written when she was just 17, it was seen as a book of amorality and sexually taboo. I see it as a book of insightful perception of how humans behave. To weigh that against a measurement of morality is injustice to the intelligence of the work. The behaviours of her characters are true to life precisely because the book has no interest with morality. There are the pitfalls of egoism, vanity, passions, the short-sightedness of youth, all of which if taken too far may lead to unexpected revelations. If this book has any theme of morality it’s in the reader only.

Durga Chew-Bose, who was already an accomplished writer, was brought onboard to write the script, and as the project developed she earned the role of its director: subsequently receiving the Toronto International Film Festival award for Emerging Talent for her debut film. Already through the script, Durga had created the world-building. A director is a novelist in public. Trading solitude for a team of highly skilled practitioners, whose job much like writing, is to turn everything into a triumph. This adapatation really benefitted from a writer’s observational tone in the direction.

I love Durga’s use of asymmetric shots. There are several transitional tableaux shots. Durga Chew-Bose said she was inspired by Ozu’s similar use of these observational moments of a moving portrait of space and time, commonly called pillow shots. My favourite was the long shot of Cecile untangling her headphones, which cuts to a shot of her wearing her earphones but the music cuts and we hear the sea. Durga Chew-Bose, really captures the feeling I had myself of imagining the book. The short stories I wrote during that time could themselves have been filmed like this. Back then all my stories were about rose-hued glasses where everything was gorgeous, peaceful, and the drama was a nothing more than passions from kind of sensual intimacy.

It made me want to see everything like this. It was like watching an old Ozu film from the 50s, or a Goddard movies of the 60s. One scene pays direct homage to David Lean’s 1955 film Summertime. There is a theme of coming of age in a different time to the adults around you. Growing up on their own terms rather than in imitation of their surrounding adults. It has within it a natural pairing with Ozu on the themes of generational distance.

A great novel, if the writer is good, should be hard to adapt to the screen because the pleasure should be in the writing. which shouldn’t translate to another medium. The images come out of the sensuality of the language. Francoise Sagan, in Bonjour Tristesse, writes not where people are, but how things feel to be there or to touch. The book evokes a tone poem of images, and the film wonderfully plays a succession of them. Durga Chew-Bose has said that she likes when adaptations of novels to film feel like a kind of subsequent continuation of the work as opposed to being a replica of it. But flows out of the book’s sense of tone, colour, and imagery.

“He has rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean, a gorgeous, secluded house that we had been dreaming of since the beginning of the warm weather in June. It stood on a promontory overlooking the sea and was hidden from the road by a pine wood. A goat-track led down to a little sun-drenched inlet edged with rustic coloured rocks where the sea swayed back and forth.”

Filmed in Cassis, in the south of France, the main location of the villa and beach were to be so private it was like a lunar landscape where they were the only ones there. Durga hints at expressions in the novel which are visually referenced rather than retold. Such as that Cecile had a shell collection, and she was particularly taken with a pink shell-like stone she found in the water.

“I caught sight of a beautiful shell-like object on the sea bed, a pink and blue stone. I dived down to get it. It was worn or smooth and I kept it in my hand until lunch. I decided it was a lucky charm and that I would hang on to it all summer. I don’t know why I haven’t lost it, because I lose everything. I am holding it today; it is pink and warm and it makes me want to weep.”

The whole book is written from the interior perspective of Cecile which without the use of voiceover is difficult to anchor in the audience as the bearing upon which everything else is interpreted. It serves the adaptation to the screen better if the characters are more objectively witnessed rather than subjectively interpreted; to be able to make our own interpretations and see Cecile in the scene at the same time. Of course, that subjectivity of Cecile as narrator in the novel has to be transferred to the role of the director. But the narrator of the novel is participating in the story in the way the camera is not. Part of the humour of the novel is the cynicism with which Cecile interprets those around her.

“Cynicism always enchanted me by producing a delicious feeling of self-assurance and of being in league with myself.”

But if across a performance, if the characters were to behave consistently in the way Cecile interprets them they would become quite dislikable characters. This also justifies reasons for why the characters in the film adaptation required modification.

All movies, that adapt a novel, have to trim the digressions into the economical drive of a short story. After all, what is a novel but a short story ample with digressions. I think if you’re looking for a replica of a book or you’re looking for a kind of audiobook moving picture version of the book this isn’t it. But that’s not the purpose of it. The characters in the novel don’t really exist in that same way today and certainly the things that they say aren’t really things said and it doesn’t need to be bound to 1954. The prior film adaptation was released in 1958.

Nevertheless, I think Durga’s women are often more mature than Françoise’s. Perhaps because Françoise was seventeen when she wrote the book and Durga could add some greater life experiences to the characters intelligence and philosophy of life, which highlights Cecile’s youthfulness seeing things from a more immediate sense of action without the maturity of reluctant acceptance, foresight, and emotional guarding that comes with age. Meaning Sagan’s women are written from an observation of character which conceals within observation the subtextual contradictions of mature adults. Youth in the other hand, acts how it believes and feels without thinking too far about outcomes. The humour in the novel is often precisely this youthful directness, as when children speak their minds without reservation.

There is almost a binary quality in the novel between the masculinity of Cyril and of Raymond. Where Cyril is a bit of a sap and Raymond is a bit of a player. Durga modifies Cyril to be less awkward and undermined by Cecile.

Cyril was a boy she met there who was spending his summer in a neighbouring villa with his mother. In the novel at least, Cyril met Cecile in the first week, having capsized his sailboat, and he appears to want to do anything for Cecile’s affection. Coming across as an agreeable, overly-compliant, love-fool. In the novel it’s not clear why Cecile has any attraction to him except from moments of a sensual physical rush that gives her an erotic vertigo. But it’s not clear from his character. It makes more sense in the film.

In the novel Cecile describes this as

“The only thing tormenting me just then was his looking at me and the thumping of my heart. “

“I kissed him passionately, I wanted to hurt him, to leave my mark on him so that he would not be able to forget me for one instant that evening and would dream of me that night.”

And in their parting

“I looked at him: I had never loved him. I had found him kind and attractive; I had loved the pleasure he gave me; but I did not need him.”

Elsewhere in the novel Anne rebukes Cecile’s view on love.

Anne “Your view of love is it rather simplistic one. Love isn’t a series of isolated sensations.”

It struck me that that was just what all my experiences have love had been: a sudden surge of emotion that someone’s gaze or gesture or kiss… Radiant moments without any underlining connection, that was all the memory I had of them.

It’s something different “ Anne was saying,” it’s about constant tenderness, gentleness, missing a person…Things you wouldn’t understand.”

The father, Raymond, like the novel might have been more vain, as that would explain more of his motivations. In the film, he comes across more laid back and aloof than vain. That’s not a criticism, that a compliment to the writing, because if he came across as consistently vain he would be a dislikable character. His character pokes fun of himself that he likes to talk about himself, but he’s aloof and living in the moments. Both Cyril and Raymond in the film are confident, easy-going and enjoying life.

Other welcomed changes, are that the novel tells us that Cyril is a law-student who is currently staying with his mother. We never meet the mother, but in the film Cyril’s mother becomes a wonderful inclusion.

The women have interesting modifications too. To be honest, I think Françoise Sagan trivialises Elsa a little. Francoise Sagan was a highly intelligent young woman, and tended to categorise people she observed by their intelligence, as one does who is proud in being and places value on being intelligent. Naturally Elsa and Anne were more binary in the novel than the characters deserved to make them real people. In fact, the novel refers to Elsa as rather dim, and Anne having a sharp world-weary intelligence. Elsa hung out at cinemas and bars whereas Anne spent time with intelligent discreet people. I like that Durga modified them into two intelligent women. Their binary quality seems in the novel to emanate from two sides of the author’s personality. On the one side the frivolity of youth and on the other an observant and bookish intelligence. Durga gives that frivolity a philosophy of its own. In the film, both Anne and Elsa are certain of who they are. They just live in different ways and have different dispositions toward life. But Durga gave Elsa a wisdom and a certainty in herself, and in her philosophy on life, that made her more interesting. This is also highlighted in comparison such as the difference between Anne and Elsa’s preferences on being read to.

I almost felt that Anne was complexly fleshed out in the novel only to highlight that she was so different from Cecile. That was still highlighted in Durga’s adaptation in wonderfully subtle ways like the difference between how Cecile and Anne spread butter on toast or ate an apple.

In Durga’s adaptation each character has their philosophy on life.

Raymond “I’ve never understood why luck is so easily dismissed. I’ve always found it to be dependable”

Anne “The moment things become forced, I question everything. Sometimes I think the point is ultimately to know less, and less, and less”

Elsa “It’s important to see things coming Cecile. Everyone will tell you to be present, to be in the moment, but I never found that to be true. I like to see things coming.”

There is something that a book can’t do that a film or play that can do effectively: utilising silence. Silences can say a lot not by what is unsaid but the expression it comes with or the actions that follows it.

The drama, both of the film and the novel, is not in the plot. The drama is in the story. And more precisely, as a viewer or a reader, in your understanding of what’s going on psychologically between the characters. There is a writer’s patience in the rhythm of the film. The heartbeat pacing of the film is like sitting in a sunny park whilst people watching, as a breeze is blowing over you.

“fear goes hand-in-hand with desire”

A person immersed in reading, surrounded by books and a warm atmosphere.