البـــــوابـــة
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Films
I Love #3: Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)
Bonjour Tristesse is, like
many of Otto Preminger's films, an extended exercise in toying with the
problems of audience identification and tone. The film shifts, in its
first ten minutes, from a somber black and white prologue in which
Cecile (Jean Seberg) and her father Raymond (David Niven) seem subtly
discontented in their upper-crust lifestyle, to a gorgeous Technicolor
flashback in which everything is breezy, carefree, and fun for the pair
and Raymond's latest fling Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). Preminger injects
the color into the film slowly, fading in some blue ocean waves over
Cecile's shoulder as she dances, then irising out from the center of the
image with a burst of color. The shift to Technicolor highlights the
contrast between the two Ceciles we see, one numb and disconnected, the
other vibrant and almost relentlessly sunny. The film tracks Cecile's
downfall as her father abandons his carefree ways to marry the
matriarchal Anne (Deborah Kerr), who immediately assumes a domineering,
motherly attitude towards the defiantly flighty Cecile. Preminger's
brilliance lies in the way he gets the audience irrevocably on Cecile's
side — it's hard not to love Seberg's smiley, unrestrained performance
and to sympathize with her desire for freedom — only to pull the rug out
as he delves more and more into the selfish, willful, and vengeful
aspects of this charming girl's personality. The film remains ambiguous,
right up to its final black and white closeup of Seberg's agonized
face, as to whether Anne or Cecile is the real victim in this battle of
wills.
As always, Preminger's direction is fascinating, his
distinctive roving camera framing and reframing the characters in
various couplings and trios, emphasizing Anne's intrusion on Cecile's
carefree life by placing her in dominant positions within the frame,
always looming over the younger girl. And yet Preminger hardly makes her
an unredeemed "evil stepmother" character, infusing her with unexpected
pathos while Kerr plays her as a complex, well-meaning woman who is
simply ill-suited to the morally loose, privileged existence enjoyed by
Cecile and Raymond. The film also provides a dazzling showcase for
Seberg in her second role, which Preminger conceived as a comeback
attempt after she was roundly mocked for her debut in his Saint Joan
the year before. The American critics mostly didn't bite this time
either, but Seberg's wide-eyed naivete and cheerful bombast made her a
curiously effective Joan of Arc, and an even better Cecile. Of course,
at least some French critics caught on to what Preminger and Seberg are
up to here, and her performance in Bonjour Tristesse directly
brought the young actress to the attention of Jean-Luc Godard, who
immediately cast her in his own debut feature. Godard picked up on the
film's purposeful tonal ambivalence and Seberg's deftness in conveying a
character who is at once charming and ruthless. He famously said that
Seberg's Patricia in Breathless was a continuation of Cecile's
arc: "I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started
after dissolving to a title, 'Three Years Later.'"
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