Bonjour Tristesse Follows “Aperol Spritz Problems” on a Glittering, Tragic French Holiday

Eventually, the producers realized the right person to make a new Bonjour Tristesse had already been hired—and had essentially written a bible on how to do it. Eight months pregnant, Chew-Bose got the call—and got to work. She hired the folks she had in mind, like Renaud-Labarthe and costume designer Miyako Bellizzi (Uncut Gems), and scouted locations. Her team set up a stunning production in Cassis, the striking beach town in the South of France. Then she filmed her exacting script, making for an auspicious debut of rich surface pleasures and a mysterious, haunting depth.

This contemporary Bonjour Tristesse, for which Chew-Bose will receive a Tribute Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, follows a family on holiday. Our guide into this world, 17-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny), lives with her widowed father, Raymond (Bad Sisters’ Claes Bang), and his new girlfriend, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). They eat, swim, sunbathe, and carry their secrets, the hallmarks of any successful Euro getaway. Then Raymond and his late wife’s old friend, a fashion designer living in Paris named Anne (Chloë Sevigny), arrives. Her poise, her smile, her style—balancing immaculate hair and makeup with, say, a men’s top and a soft skirt—all throw Cécile off. She’s disrupting their harmony while also peeling off a painful scab. Yet Cécile is undeniably drawn to Anne as well.

Here, the performances of McInerny—in just her second film role after breaking out in Palm Trees and Power Lines—and Sevigny, beguiling in one of her richest film roles in years, lock into place. “By loving Anne, Cécile reveals an absence in her life that she wasn’t previously aware of—there’s a push and pull between desiring closeness, desiring nurture, while being sort of resentful for that,” McInerny says. “I felt really starstruck with Chloë, so I could channel some of those feelings of admiration, of defining my style and my sense of femininity as Lily. I could use that as inspiration for the way Cécile looks up to Anne.”

As Anne rekindles her bond with Raymond, Cécile schemes to keep Elsa in the picture. In Chew-Bose’s hands, a thorny game of manipulation, suffused with grief and broken-heartedness and teenage abandon, ensues. “I was reflecting on some of the women in my life and my friendships, and this was a place that was rich to use to explore that,” Chew-Bose says. “There’s a quality to these women and how they influence each other and spar and pay attention to each other that is evergreen to me. Women paying attention to each other is just endlessly fascinating to me.”

Bonjour Tristesse hurtles toward abrupt tragedy, a gasp-worthy consequence of these tricky character dynamics. “At first I was a little resistant to the material—I was like, Do we really want to propel this idea?” Sevigny tells me. “Durga, in her magical, wily ways, convinced me that the movie was saying something otherwise.” Chew-Bose marvels at how Sevigny made Anne her own. Indeed, the actor wears Anne’s fashion in a way only she could—looking both cool and vulnerable, striking and effortless. It’s appropriate for the role, which asks Sevigny to hold back while teasing Anne’s state of mind —for the whole of the film.

“I have a lot of friends that have passed the childbearing age who have devoted themselves to their art,” Sevigny, who had her first child in 2020, says. “For me, it was an examination of a woman in that state—does she regret it, and then how does she deal with the younger generation?” Her reluctant maternal instincts toward Cécile, for instance, only add to that complexity. Sevigny laughs thinking about the scenes that were toughest to figure out, saying she had a guiding light. “I was feeling very much like a vessel, and when I was struggling, I would just try to act like Durga,” she says. “That’s kind of just what Durga likes—this awkwardness.”

“I want people to feel like they’ve been brought in, but not too close,” Chew-Bose says. “They are invited into a world that feels sort of familiar to them, but also disorienting.” Shot by Maximilian Pittner, Bonjour Tristesse sweeps the audience away in the tradition of European cinema’s most iconic summer holidays—it’s shot entirely on location and makes rather remarkable use of the town. But it maintains an intoxicating claustrophobia all the same; true to Anne’s character, the movie’s design is both stunning and unsettling. “We would go to some locations and the rocks were too orange for me,” Chew-Bose says. “I knew I wanted a palette that was much more white, brown, and blue.”

Off camera, things stayed fluid and not too serious: “A lot of babies were around,” Sevigny cracks. “My kid was there, Durga’s kid was there, the producers’ kids were there. It was like a baby set.”

Bonjour Tristesse’s influences reveal themselves clearly, and rather than shrink in their face, this film manages to contribute to their lineage: the sweaty summers of Lucrecia Martel, the moody wonders of Bergman, the psychological depth of Mia Hansen-Løve. Citing these filmmakers, Chew-Bose emphasizes repeatedly that “nothing happens” in their best work. It’s hyperbole, of course, but to the extent it’s true, that space provides an opportunity. Bonjour Tristesse is filled with long scenes that hold the audience in suspense as to what everyone is thinking, or how the mood might change; the moment when you see devastation overcome a given character and they have to hide it; the relief that comes with taking a deep breath on the sand.

The film’s opening scene finds Cécile on a boat with her own beau, under a glittering sun—the calm before the emotionally overpowering storm. The sense in the movie is there’s not a problem in the world—and even that is a testament to the commitment of the filmmaking and performances. “The sea was so rough that we lost about half of our crew to sea sickness,” McInerny says, chuckling at the memory. “Very few of us were left standing.” Later, she stepped on a sea urchin. Call it out in the elements, le Midi-style. “Champagne problems,” McInerny says. “Or, I guess, Aperol spritz problems.”

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