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BONJOUR TRISTESSE

Otto Preminger United States, 1958
Preminger's mise-en-scène reaches something of an apex here, as he groups bodies into rigid formations, often sculpting physical love triangles in the ‘Scope frame, never allowing the exuberant Technicolor to eclipse his lucid grip on the existential sorrow that grips these wayward souls.
June 15, 2016
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Preminger came into Bonjour Tristesse with something to prove. His previous film, an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, had been a rare critical flop, with the teenage Seberg... singled out for the harshest criticism. Seberg did not have a lot of range or experience as an actor. What she did have, however, was an unvarnished presence; even if her line readings often sound flat, they never sound less than genuine. She was eminently filmable.
October 3, 2014
Its story is little more than a shopworn tale of Oedipal jealousy between an impressionable young girl and her philandering father, but Preminger endows proceedings with every available luxury, and via the power of cinematic decadence he transforms a work of dimestore fiction into a sweeping epic.
August 29, 2013
It's a sort of cinematic mixing pot, one filled with any number of familiar (which is to say, seemingly friendly) tropes and characters, but what emerges from it is difficult to pin down. At its best and in hindsight it's not unlike The Rules of the Game insofar as its comic elements slowly give way to tragedy, and yet its climax doesn't render everything that precedes it ironic or sad by association. Like the bright cinematography, memory keeps the better days intact.
April 27, 2012
Preminger is a cinpehile god, and rightfully so, but I'm unconvinced that—of his many films that could receive week-long revivals—Bonjour Tristesse will evangelize the uninitiated. This is indeed visual storytelling, in the most obvious ways: Cécile is crowded to the edge of the frame once her beloved daddy takes over most of the screen with his fiancée and so on. The effects are purely visual (textbook "cinematic," in fact) but no more revelatory for that, and the dialogue can be hard to take.
April 25, 2012
Otto Preminger's formally dazzling 1958 film is an edifice constructed of contrasts. A narrative flashing back from a glassy black-and-white Paris to a glittering Technicolor Riviera divides the world between serious, sober people and silly, inconsequential ones, and watches the wreckage that results when the two collide.
April 25, 2012
Preminger invites us to observe Anne upending Cecile's carefree existence and the teen not so kindly retaliating, and in other hands, the doom-laden narrative might come off as prurient or lurid. Yet the director uses the expansive CinemaScope frame and his eye for luxuriant, clinical mise en scéne to soberly probe rather than gleefully prod, and the cast is across-the-board exemplary.
April 23, 2012
Self-Styled Siren
What is interesting about Seberg in this film is the way she handles her obvious insecurities as an actress... Her movements in Bonjour Tristesse are perfection, or close--whether she is planting a kiss on the boy she's chosen to take her virginity, reaching her arms out to her father on a dance floor, chucking a picture into a drawer in a fit of temper or just getting ice cream out of the icebox, Seberg's every bit of body language plays as truth.
April 26, 2010
The past is depicted in sumptuous color, which renders the pleasures of sun, sea, and sky heavy with doom. The best is saved for last: at a climactic moment, offscreen voices conjure a staggering coup de théâtre that brings the dénouement to life in a series of indelible images. A brilliant dialectical filmmaker, Preminger extracts the last ounce of pathos from the anguish of the mute witness.
January 1, 2010
Ferdy on Films
...Preminger's best films work in such a fashion, beginning with a chitinous but brittle sheen, and then digging until a far more complex vision resolves. Bonjour Tristesse is one such film.
October 26, 2009
Preminger's impressionism, blindly dismissed by reviewers as magazine gloss writ 'Scope but appreciated in France, where it provided budding New Wavers with a few pointers. The sadness is one of dawning lucidity, or perhaps the loneliness of "limbo", in any case sublimity in the final close-up, the last of the director's fallen angels and angel faces in tears and facial cream, expressing everything and nothing.
May 10, 2008
A first viewing of Bonjour Tristesse tends to accentuate the seeming multitude of faults even as one revels in Preminger's remarkable filmmaking savvy... But, miraculously, most of those faults eventually reveal themselves to be extraordinary attributes. It seems as though Preminger is working in Sirk territory, deliberately using the glossy, surface-concerned nature of Hollywood filmmaking in the ‘50s as a means of distancing himself from plot minutiae and looking at the larger picture.
December 8, 2003