Bonjour Tristesse
by Otto Preminger
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DVD details
Actor: David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Geoffrey Horne, Jean Seberg, Myl?ne DemongeotDirector: Otto Preminger
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Portuguese (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Japanese (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 93 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-12-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures
DVD Reviews of Bonjour Tristesse
DVD Review: FAVORITE MOVIE
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of my all-time favorite movies. I first saw it when I was very young. It is sad but funny, too, although not a comedy.DVD Review: Another study in a teenage girl's destructive dislike for her widowed father's lover...
Summary: 3 Stars
The films of Otto Preminger share for the most part a detached objectivity in their attitudes to character and moral issues...
In "Bonjour Tristesse," his gamine prot?g? Cecile (Jean Seberg) is a very peculiar girl, maybe spoiled and willful and arrogant and lazy...
Anne (Deborah Kerr) had made her look at herself for the first time in her life...And that turned her against her... And now, her father is not having fun anymore, which was probably another reason she decided to get rid of her... How carefully and how seriously she went about that decision, is the tale of Fran?oise Sagan, published in 1954, by the time she was nineteen...
Raymond (David Niven) is a bundle of surprises... For him, it's such a wonderful fun to have Cecile for a daughter... And loving Anne doesn't mean that he loves his daughter any less... The wealthy playboy becomes serious from the moment that Anne arrived... He could never think of her as just someone to have fun with... He does have fun with Elsa (Myl?ne Demongeot) but that's a long way from being all he wants... Now, he has never wanted any woman the way he wants Anne...
Anne spent her honeymoon by the sea 12 years ago... She had quite a debate with herself before coming down to the French Riviera... For knowing that Elsa was there, she got stupidly angry and decided to leave...Then the prospect of packing and looking for a hotel was too much after that long drive so she decided to stay...
Being too sophisticated (maybe for discovering occupied territory), Anne was as suspicious of summer as she was of Raymond in spite of the fact that she knew him 15 years ago, and was quite sure that with him, nobody is safe...
For Cecile, Anne is prim and prissy and prude... For a woman who hates vulgarities--even when they're funny--she could never be seriously interested in a man like her father... So part of her was angry, part was happy, all of her was excited... Her father had brought a girl to the seashore, made her go out in the sun and then when she was a mess of peeling, dropped her like a hot lobster... It was unfair... Yet even while she was angry at him, she was proud that he had gotten the unattainable Anne... Anne looks now softer... She moves easier... In the morning, she seems as though she had the most wonderful secret in the world...
Suddenly she becomes aware of a great responsibility towards Cecile, as it would be good if she stops seeing Philippe (Geoffrey Horne) and studies for her philosophy examination...
Cecile becomes furious at her interference... Anne wants her to study and not to see Philippe... So what shall it be? For her, there'll be a man to take care of her...And she doesn't need a diploma for that...
Now she hates Anne... For her, she has changed her father...She'll change her and will change everything...
DVD Review: My Kiss Has No Caress
Summary: 5 Stars
Juliette Greco is perfection as the aging nightclub singer at a chic Paris boite, who sings to strangers night after night of a "street with no address." Irretrievably ravaged by time and perfidious love, Greco gives the part nearly everything she has; in her excellent Givenchy gown she bespeaks chic even as she allows emotion to tremble through her quack of a voice. As she sings the haunting title track, Jean Seberg is twirling around on the dancefloor simultaneously drinking Greco in and obsessing about her own memories of a colorful, blue-splashed summer on the French Riviera, the summer in which the mystic numbers "7" and "e" combined to form a summer of death and disaster.
Preminger is superbly understated here, his direction of Seberg assured and yet improvisatory. Some have criticized the way that Seberg, Niven, and Kerr never even try to sound like French people, and some say that the heavily accented English of the fourth lead, Mylene Demongeot, sounds like gobbledegook and makes her co-stars seem even flatter. None of them is actually convincing, and Niven and Kerr are oddly miscast, but all of them are great in their own lights. Kerr is believable as a dress designer, Niven sort of believable as a girl's best friend kind of dad, though neither of them seem sexy enough for their parts. Maybe in real life David Niven was some sort of super playboy but I'm just not feeling it here. Why didn't they just hire Jimmy Stewart if they wanted a palsy kind of older actor to be Seberg's father? She seems like she's in love with him, or does she just feel responsible for his happiness since the mother's death? I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and to discover that she had "accidentally" killed the mother, but we never get that story, maybe in the sequel?
What's great about the movie--beyond the main cast? Saul Bass' title design has got to be among his very best: the pattern of gold coins and crosses moving along a black screen like stars in the night sky, gradually being supplanted by red hearts and blue waves, and finally resolving themselves into the famous line drawing of Juliette Greco's crying face--OMG, you will feel like you've died and woken up in France.
Geoffrey Horne as the boy next door, especially the scene where Cecile musters up all her courage and runs to his house, skips through the hallways like a thing possessed, and then pauses outside a door. She throws open the door and you see a dimly lit room and Geoffrey Horne asleep, face down, on a single bed, the whole room lit up by the eerie, glowing white of his incredibly revealing underwear. Va va voom, no wonder she jumps on that law student!
Also the color design of the film, how the present is in black and white, but the flashbacks in color. The first, Juliette Greco scene,is especially impressive in this regard as Seberg, haunted by the past, is glimpsed dancing over the shoulder of her partner, until shards of color (blue) bombard her in triangles stripped into the negative (I guess) that finally overwhelm her and propel the film directly into the past, Must be taken from those Jazz cut-outs of Matisse; this sequence is a direct ancestor of Kylie Minogue's Riviera-like videos for "Slow" and "On a Night Like This." In fact the Kylie-Rutger Hauer relationship in the "On a Night Like This" clip definitely smacks of the Seberg-Niven one here in BT. Maybe I'm overthinking this.
DVD Review: OTTO PREMINGER, OPUS 24
Summary: 5 Stars
****1/2 1958. this film was based on Fran?oise Sagan bestseller Bonjour Tristesse: A Novel (P.S.) and was produced and directed by Otto Preminger. A wealthy playboy and his seventeen years old daughter C?cile live an insouciant life. They are spending the summer on the French Riviera when one of Raymond's old friend Anne comes to their house near the sea. C?cile imagines a scheme to get rid of the intruder when Raymond decides to marry Anne. Preminger chose two actors who already worked for him, David The Moon Is Blue [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - France ] Niven and Jean Saint Joan [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - France ] Seberg in order to give life to Sagan's characters. And they are superb in these roles. With the sublime Deborah Kerr as Anne the intruder, our pleasure is complete. Also note the titles by Saul Bass, the song BONJOUR TRISTESSE sung by the French icon Juliette Gr?co and the smart idea to film the flashbacks in color and the present in black & white. Highly recommended. DVD Review: 'Whoops'
Summary: 3 Stars
Would've been more captivating had it been the first time I'd seen this kind of movie, but it wasn't. Technical aspects held my interest -- especially the cinematography; the use of black and white for the present and color for flashbacks was effective. The performances were okay. Jean Seberg is easy on the eyes. Her real life story is more interesting than any of her film roles. It's an inkblot.
Description of Bonjour Tristesse
Cool and introspective, Otto Preminger's sleek, stylish Bonjour Tristesse is one of his most understated films. Jean Seberg stars as a spoiled teenager who acts with a high-society sophistication beyond her years, and dapper David Niven is her playboy father, going through young female playmates like socks. Flitting through the French jet set and comparing conquests, they summer on the gorgeous French Riviera, where mature fashion designer Deborah Kerr enters their lives and wins Niven's heart. Seeing an end to her lifestyle, Seberg plots an end to the relationship with equal parts conniving ruthlessness and juvenile prankishness, too self-absorbed to even consider the brutal results of her actions. Told in flashback from a sleek but shadowy black-and-white Paris, the film melts into the vivid Technicolor of memory. Seberg's voiceover narration is arch, but her impish, often petulant performance is perfect, as is Niven's flippant, womanizing bachelor father (Preminger lets their curious, flirtatious intimacy hang like an unanswered question and a nervous subtext). Kerr's middle-aged working woman seems almost puritanical compared to the irrepressible travelers, but under her rules and limits lies an honest concern for a "child" who believes herself an adult. Preminger's camera prowls through the drama just removed enough to be respectful, and intimate enough to get under the characters' skin. Like the best of his dramas, there are no heroes or villains, only complex, flawed, achingly sympathetic characters. --Sean AxmakerGeneral DVDs
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