Not just ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ with cellphones: At TIFF, a classic gets a modern update

Among the more anticipated world premieres at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel “Bonjour Tristesse,” which marks the filmmaking debut of author Durga Chew-Bose.

The film plays Thursday as part of the festival’s Discovery section, where filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuarón, Maren Ade, Christopher Nolan, Yorgos Lanthimos and Barry Jenkins have also premiered early works. Chew-Bose, who directed and wrote the screenplay for “Bonjour Tristesse,” has also been tapped to receive one of the festival’s filmmaker tribute awards at a fundraising gala on Sunday night.

Widely celebrated for her sharp observations on the contradictions of contemporary life, most notably in her 2017 collection of essays “Too Much and Not in the Mood,” Chew-Bose has frequently written about her enthusiasm for cinema and has also profiled performers such as Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart for Vanity Fair. This comes across in the film as more than just fandom or even appreciation; Chew-Bose clearly has a deep, passionate engagement with the art and craft of making movies.

In the film, teenage Cécile (Lily McInerny) is spending an idyllic summer at a rustic seaside French villa with her father Raymond (Claes Bang) and his girlfriend Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). But with the arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of both Raymond and of Cécile’s late mother, everything cracks open. Anne and Raymond rekindle long-forgotten feelings and make hasty plans to marry. Cécile is deeply unnerved by this and recklessly maneuvers to split them apart, with more disastrous consequences than she could have foreseen.

The film has a keen interest in visual details that build a world, and a mood, that stick: the specific disarray atop a side table, the way fabric falls off a shoulder, the late-afternoon light through a curtain. Along with cinematographer Maximilian Pittner, the creative team on the film includes “Uncut Gems” costume designer Miyako Bellizzi and production designer François-Renaud Labarthe, who regularly works with director Olivier Assayas.

Though in conversation Chew-Bose references filmmakers such as Edward Yang, Claire Denis and Ingmar Bergman with a familiar ease, her influences were, as she puts it, “not all just off the Criterion Collection.” (One shot, she explains, was swiped from “Moneyball.”)

Otto Preminger’s 1958 adaptation of the book helped make a star of Jean Seberg in the role of Cécile. Here the part is played by McInerny, who was nominated for a Spirit Award for her debut in 2022’s “Palm Trees and Power Lines” and has recently been seen in an advertising campaign for Celine shot by Hedi Slimane.

In a recent phone call from her home in Montreal, Chew-Bose recalls that the first villa they saw while location scouting in Cassis, in the south of France, ended up being the one they used.

“I loved it for how it was a bit unexpected as a location. It didn’t look like what I imagined people would think when they think the south of France,” says Chew-Bose. “There was something kind of rough and mysterious about it that spoke to me. And because so much of the story takes place there, I just have to listen to the villa saying, ‘Choose me.’”

Chew-Bose also spoke about her first film being an adaptation, telling a father-daughter story in the aftermath of her own father’s death and why Sagan’s tale retains contemporary resonance.

Director Durga Chew-Bose, left, photographs actor Lily McInerny on the set of “Bonjour Tristesse.”

(Babe Nation)

You’ve spoken and written quite a bit about what movies mean to you, how they’re really part of the fabric of your life. Now that you’re on the other side of the process, was there a big lesson or surprise?

One thing that really caught me off guard — and it might make me sound sort of naive, but I really do feel it’s worth saying — is you have all these extraordinarily talented people, and in my case, who all have more experience than me, arriving to set every day wanting to come close to the vision that I have for this world that I want to build. And you have to be able to communicate that. You have to get people to trust you when you don’t have an answer, when you are maybe more open to doubt than certainty. And you also are given this chance to learn at a really quick clip.

I think the ways in which I’ve changed since making this film, I will still feel the impact of for the rest of my life. Because you are collaborating with so many artists who are extremely skilled at hyper-specific aspects of the film .... Like my editor [Amélie Labrèche], I always thought that rhythm was a huge part of how I write and the films that I’m drawn to. And working with her was an education in rhythm and how movies are all about rhythm. And she was so good at that and actually has now impacted the way I’m writing my next script because now I get to write having been in this sort of clinic with a great editor. So the ways in which various aspects of the filmmaking process have now impacted my writing is really beautiful because all I had before was my writing. And now these other tenets of film are going back to that original thing I started with. So it’s changed me at the bedrock of my voice.

It’s striking that you chose to do an adaptation for your first film as opposed to an original story. What was that process like for you? What made you want to adapt “Bonjour Tristesse”?

My producers Lindsay Tapscott and Katie Nolan, this was their idea. This project has taken eight years to make. They reached out to me to come on board strictly as the screenwriter. They had read my book of essays and felt, for whatever reason, that I was the one to adapt Françoise Sagan’s book. And I really do feel like saying all credit to them because they had this wild vision. And I think that, to be honest, I had a bit of resistance, not because it was an adaptation, but because the book wasn’t this beloved part of my adolescence and it wasn’t like a skeleton key to me as a young woman in terms of opening up the world to me. It was a book I had read once.

And I think that my reluctance at first to say yes, to come on board as the writer, was actually what seduced me in terms of writing it. I felt like I could truly adapt it because it wasn’t a part of my DNA as a reader or as a woman. I felt there was room there to impart my voice. And so, yes, it’s not my original story, but I actually treated the challenge of adapting it as if it were: “What can I say? How can I be additive? How can my voice continue the story?” Not just the Françoise Sagan book, but the Otto Preminger version. That is a huge part of the book’s iconography. It’s not just that it was this major book, it was a major film with major stars. So I really kind of see it like our “Bonjour Tristesse” is sort of a continuation of that history. Adapting it for my first film, I just don’t think strategically like that. I just do one thing at a time. If I write one book and never write another book again, so be it. If I make one film, and it’s an adaptation, it’s still my voice.

Claes Bang, left, Lily McInerny and Chloë Sevigny in Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse.”

(Babe Nation)

Not to be reductive about what you can do, but I think people might expect that you would make a movie more directly connected to the themes and ideas of your book having to do with identity, yourself as a child of immigrants and growing up in a multicultural community. How did you find your way into this story?

It’s a great question because I’m really happy to say, “Well, isn’t it nice to not do what people expect of you?” That brings me a lot of joy too. And one thing that I will say about the topics that you’re talking about, in my essay collection those are just a small part. I do write a lot about film and I do write a lot about directors who have influenced [me], not just as an audience member and now a director, but as a writer and as a woman and as a daughter. So I welcome that surprise. I hope that people are always surprised by the art that they encounter and that they don’t go in thinking they know what to expect.

And in some ways I actually do think that the themes that I have continued to be interested in as a reader and a writer and a moviegoer I’ve tried to put into this film, be it women’s interiority, women’s influence on each other, a woman alone in a room and what does that look like and feel like, fathers and daughters. So I think, yes, people will be surprised, but I actually think that close readers might feel like this is part of the language that I’ve always written in, and now I just have had this incredible privilege to do it in a movie.

I want to be sure to ask simply about the decision to make the film contemporary. There is something that’s still very timeless about it; they are in the remote countryside. But they do have cellphones. What was it about this story that you felt was contemporary, could speak to today?

I’m happy you used the word timeless, because I always wanted to create a world in which it could feel familiar, but disorienting at the same time. And I think that’s what timelessness means to me. I also wanted to be very careful that it wasn’t just “Bonjour Tristesse” with cellphones either. So it was about finding that balance.

I felt the book was very modern for multiple reasons. And I use the word modern, meaning these characters’ urgencies, their interiorities, their conflict, the ways in which they contradict themselves. That will all forever be modern to me. And I think the way I wanted to push that further was [to] focus on the lives of these women, because I kept coming back to them. So I always felt it was contemporary because these women were speaking to me, and when I was reading the book it felt like a continuation of so many themes that I’m always thinking about.

And then I guess I’ve always loved father-daughter films. So this also felt part of that canon. And that’s forever a great story to me. And I mean like all of them: I love “Paper Moon,” but I [also] love “Contact.” Father-daughter films to me have always been [about] a relationship that feels like the last two people left on Earth.

I’m sorry to have to bring this up, but you’ve talked about how your father died just a couple days before shooting began. Did that alter your relationship to the material? Were you responding to the father-daughter element in the story more strongly because of what you were personally going through? How do you think that impacted the movie?

I don’t know yet. There’s no question it impacted the movie and impacted everyone on set. I really do feel like it was, and I don’t use this word lightly, an extraordinary thing to happen. And with that came a lot of sadness and grief, but also a lot of guidance. And made me even more grateful for everything I had and what I could do. And it made me take to heart every single moment we were all there making a film together. It was like the worst thing ever happened to me in the most extraordinary setting. And that alchemy and that explosion of emotions is probably somewhere in the movie. But I also resisted making the whole movie about my own personal experience.

I was still there to lead and listen and learn. The making of the movie is also just as important to me as the movie itself. And a lot of that has to do with my dad passing, because I grieved with my crew and these were the people I saw every day. I didn’t go home. So it makes my first film even more of this moment in time that is extremely vivid and frankly forced me to be really, really present. Everyone’s always like, “try to take it all in.” But I had something absolutely horrible happen and it forced me to treat every second with all of myself as much as I could. He wanted me to make this movie. So I was going to make this movie.