Françoise Sagan was 17 when she scribbled out her first novel in the smoky jazz cellars of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The story was simple, maybe even familiar by today’s standards. Cécile, the willful teenage narrator, is vacationing on the Côte d’Azur with her rakish widowed father, Raymond. Two peas in a pod, they pursue an uncomplicated life of pleasure. Cécile sunbathes, swims, smokes, and sleeps with a handsome law student. When Raymond’s stuffy new girlfriend threatens to spoil her fun, Cécile plots to split them up, leading to tragic results.
Published in 1954, Bonjour Tristesse was decadent, amoral, and scandalous—“a vulgar, sad little book,” according to one reviewer. Sagan’s story of existential ennui bathed in Bain de Soleil flew off the shelves, quickly making its author a literary It Girl and paparazzi target. A film version, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jean Seberg, appeared in 1958. And now a remake, directed by the writer Durga Chew-Bose and starring Chloë Sevigny, Claes Bang, Lily McInerny, and Nailia Harzoune will debut next month at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Sagan’s son, Denis Westhoff, is among the executive producers.)
In the period following the book’s publication, the French press couldn’t get enough of Sagan. Speeding down the Rue de Rivoli in her Jaguar, gambling away her advance in the casinos of Deauville, losing herself in the sensual rhythms of Left Bank nightlife, she represented a new kind of woman, a gamine Beatnik who danced the cha-cha barefoot, took male and female lovers, and counted singer Juliette Gréco and film director Florence Malraux as friends. Bonjour Tristesse helped usher in an era of rebellious youth.
Sagan had intended to shock, and shock she did. People marveled at a teen author so effortlessly balancing cynicism and sophistication. Some even speculated (wrongly) that an older man had written the book. Paris Match called her “an 18-year-old Colette.” Le Monde dismissed the novel as “immoral.” Scolds fretted about it “dealing a fatal blow to the image of young French women.” Predictably, this made the book only more appealing. In the first two years, it sold more than 350,000 copies in France alone.
Where Saints Go to Be Sinners
It wasn’t long before Preminger picked up Bonjour Tristesse for a film adaptation. Known for pushing boundaries, Preminger shocked everyone when he cast the all-American Jean Seberg as the Parisienne Cécile.
Far from the image of rebellious, disaffected youth, Seberg’s childhood in Iowa had consisted of bake sales, sledding, and limestone Lutheran churches. Where Sagan had been kicked out of convent school for stringing up a bust of Molière, Seberg was writing letters to her grandmother and earning good-citizen awards. Sagan, at 19, was already world-weary and sun-faded, perpetual Gallic crescents carved out under her eyes. But Seberg still had what Preminger wanted. The film began production in July 1957 in Le Lavandou, just west of Sagan’s beloved St. Tropez.
A few years before, St. Tropez had been a tranquil fishing village. Sagan would drive down barefoot in her convertible Jaguar, have a drink at the town’s only bar—a dank little café smelling of lemon and insecticide—and stop by Vachon for white canvas pants and rope espadrilles. Like many who “discover” a place early, Sagan felt protective toward St. Tropez. The town felt like her secret then—the laundry strung up between windows, the fishermen’s boats, the hard glitter of the azure water, the overgrown terraces, the old women knitting on door stoops and trading gossip in their “delicious” local accent.
Speeding down the Rue de Rivoli in her Jaguar, gambling away her advance in the casinos of Deauville, losing herself in the sensual rhythms of Left Bank nightlife, she represented a new kind of woman.
It wouldn’t last. In 1956 Brigitte Bardot put St. Tropez on the map with Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman. In three short years it had exploded with boutiques, discotheques, and swarms of tourists shelling out for overpriced bouillabaisse. But the area between Marseille and Cannes still felt wild and new, heavy with the heady scent of jasmine and bay laurel. A place where saints go to be sinners. Seberg had shown up eager, fresh as a daisy, but she soon shed her earnestness for the nonchalant decadence of the French Riviera.
They shot the film in a three-story villa belonging to Sagan’s friend the publishing tycoon Pierre Lazareff. It was a magnificent setting, but the pressure on set was intense. Preminger was up to his nasty old tricks of tirades and bullying. Most of his abuse—his way of eliciting a “true” performance—was directed at Seberg. While Sagan was racing off to the roulette tables of Cannes, Seberg confided to a friend that she nearly threw herself off the balcony of the Carlton.
Whether because of Preminger’s tirades or in spite of them, Seberg lights up the screen. Her bateau necklines, gingham prints, cropped pants, short shorts with side slits, and men’s shirts (chambray, tied at the waist, borrowed from her father) set her apart. The ballerina shoes, flat sandals, and jaunty sailor collars still look modern today.
Seberg’s casual, coltish looks anticipate the seismic style shake-up of the 1960s. Her pixie cut pre-dates Mia Farrow’s crop by a full 10 years, and her basket bags appear long before Jane Birkin carried them in 1969’s La Piscine. You can sense the stirrings of the coming decade, a generation of girls eager to throw off the shackles of sexual oppression—and repression.
When the summer’s tragic end catapults Cécile into unwelcome maturity, Seberg now appears more grown up. She stares expressionless into the camera as she dances with her father in a sophisticated cocktail dress. It’s a powerful moment: lost innocence, guilt, and a dress designed by Hubert de Givenchy that made fashion history.
In the film’s final scene, Cécile wipes off the night’s makeup, guilty as a midcentury Lady Macbeth. She sits at her dressing table, gazing coolly in the mirror. The grueling shot required take after take, but the scene remains one of the film’s most memorable and poignant moments.
Georges Auric’s original soundtrack sets the melancholic mood. The title song is sung live by Gréco, dressed in black with cat-lined eyes, onstage at a tiny nightclub. “I wake up every morning,” she sings, “and say, ‘Bonjour, tristesse.’”
Elizabeth Winder is the author of Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones
