Bonjour Tristesse (1958/Sony/Columbia/Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray)
Picture:
A- Sound: B+ Extras: C Film: A-
PLEASE
NOTE: This Blu-ray is limited to 3,000 copies
and is available exclusively at the Screen Archives website which can be
reached at the link at the end of this review
Throughout
its life, Otto Preminger's 1958 film Bonjour
Tristesse has been touted as the progenitor of many a new waves. In the late '50s and early '60s, Godard and
his Cashier du Cinema cohort openly heralded the film as a signal influence,
while critics from Andrew Sarris to Dave Kehr have drawn connections from the
film to a number of milestone achievements in European filmmaking. In an essay accompanying Twilight Time's
excellent limited edition Blu-Ray package of the film, which was released in
November, Julie Kirgo writes that Bonjour
Tristesse's "coolly objective view of the foibles of the rich and
neurotic would have its effect on films as different as Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Michelangelo
Antonioni's L'Avventura."
While
these assessments are accurate - Breathless,
for example, is a direct descendant of Bonjour
Tristesse (in fact, Godard has said his film could easily have begun from
the last shot of Preminger's) – they are incomplete. Preminger's film might have been the tidal
force that kicked up a number of European new waves, but it also, and perhaps
more importantly, churned up the framework of cinema modernism.
Based on
a surprise bestseller by Françoise Sagan, Bonjour
Tristesse is a film long on melodrama – a bourgeois, emotionally incestuous
love parallelogram between 17-year-old Cecile (Jean Seberg), her widower
father, Raymond (David Niven), his of-the-moment young playmate Elsa (Mylène
Demongeot), and an old family friend, fashion designer Anne (Deborah Kerr) that
plays out on the French Riviera "last summer.” Yet Preminger doesn't languish in the
superficiality of a rich-behaving-badly plot.
Instead he luxuriates in the formal possibilities this otherwise trite
narrative offers and builds his film around them.
Most
overtly, Preminger jumps between black-and-white and color, present and past,
to drive home the consequences of youthful (and privileged) disregard. The first time this transition occurs, it's a
bit like going to Oz. The film opens in
the black-and-white present, but as Cecile narrates the movie-long flashback
about last summer's events, things dissolve into sensuous Technicolor. As captured by cinematographer Georges
Périnal, the blazing color of the French Riviera – and Cecile's innocence – is
hyper-exotic. The blue of the Mediterranean, the greens and yellows of clothing, even
the red of sunburn pops with a supernatural luminescence. When we're wrenched back into the present,
the black-and-white (itself deep and sumptuous, not content to take a backseat
to color) accentuates the pallor of Cecile’s nascent adulthood.
As fusty
and obvious as this device feels today, could anything be more
self-reflexive? We're never lulled into
a passive state of viewership because Preminger never allows us to ignore the
artificiality of what we're watching.
Cinema is pieces and cuts and film stocks and shots and dissolves that
are smashed together to forge a false reality, as false and duplicitous as the
characters we're watching. Yet in the
end, Bonjour Tristesse is more about
film structure than Sirk-on-the-Mediterranean.
Watching it now is like watching a prototype of Contempt or Pierrot le fou
or Last Year at Marienbad or Red Desert or 8½ exploding out of Hollywood's
sputtering dream factory.
Like the
modernist cinema it would inspire, Bonjour
Tristesse is similarly imbued with a sense of detachment – from society,
convention, and expectation – thanks to Preminger's compositional choices. Rather than placating middlebrow audiences by
simply connecting them to sweeping CinemaScope vistas, Preminger uses the very
widescreen as a means of communicating alienation – physically and
emotionally. At the start of the film,
Cecile and Raymond are almost one body; when Anne arrives and Raymond's
affections begin to turn, Cecile is subtly pushed further and further
aside. As this happens, Preminger begins
internalizing the film and deploying the close-up to devastating effect. Reactions become singular, rather than group,
experiences, with actors responding to loose talk, innuendo, and hegemonic
threats in utter solitude within an unforgivingly epic frame. The payoff – if it's possible to find
pleasure in unmitigated cruelty – is Anne's discovery of Raymond and Elsa at
the film's climax (played with wrenching honesty by Kerr) and the final shot of
Cecile staring into a mirror, coating her face in crème, and crying as the
consequences of last summer wash over her (and Seberg saves her capsizing
career).
By the
end, Preminger has moved Bonjour
Tristesse completely inward. The
film has always been interior – Cecile's is telling it through her point of
view – but now we realize we have no way into the film other than through her,
and we'll only get what she'll allow us to have. It would be noir if Cecile weren't so icy and
clinical – and modern. Alexander
Sesonske writes in the essay accompanying Criterion's release of 8½ that Fellini’s film "announces
in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema.” With all due respect, I would argue it’s the
last frames of Bonjour Tristesse –
meticulously deliberate in its self-reflexivity, ruthlessly exquisite in its
disenchantment with society –that herald the arrival of modernism in cinema.
Twilight
Time's Blu-Ray release of Bonjour
Tristesse might not expand the conversation about the film – the disc is
limited to 3,000 units. But it certainly
does the film justice, from a presentation standpoint if not in terms of
extras.
Sony
released an incomparable DCP restoration of Bonjour Tristesse in early 2012, and this Blu-Ray captures its
beauty. The film, simply, looks
brilliant. Its Technicolor sections are
warm and glorious, while the black-and-white is inky and atmospheric in this
amazing 1080p digital High Definition presentation. There's no discernible grain, yet the
restoration and Blu-Ray don't lose the film quality of the source. The disc's DTS-HD MA 1.0 Mono lossless audio
won't blow the roof off your home theater, but then again it's not supposed
to. The sound is crisp and clean, with
clear dialogue and a rich soundtrack.
Clinking glasses, lapping waves, and creaking furniture never compete
with raucous parties, crowded clubs, and intimate moments, or vice versa, while
Georges Auric’s score never overwhelms the diegesis.
Extras-wise,
the disc features Auric's score as an isolated track (a standard on Twilight
Time releases), an awkward domestic trailer featuring footage from the film and
a weird interview with author Françoise Sagan, and liner notes from Julie
Kirgo. Not much, but it's one special
feature more than many Twilight Time releases.
Still, Bonjour Tristesse almost begs for
something more – perhaps not a Criterion treatment, but certainly something to
speak to it's historical importance.
That comes across in Kirgo's essay, but a short documentary or a more
robust booklet would have been a nice addition.
Ultimately, though, it's hard to argue with this release when a film
this compelling is presented so beautifully.
As noted
above, Bonjour Tristesse can be
ordered while supplies last at:
www.screenarchives.com
- Dante A. Ciampaglia
