Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/18/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

David Niven, Deborah Kerr, and Jean Seberg in Bonjour Tristesse

Cast: Jean Seberg, David Niven, Deborah Kerr, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Elga Anderson, Jeremy Burnham, Eveline Eyfel. Screenplay: Arthur Laurents, based on a novel by Françoise Sagan. Cinematography: Georges Périnal. Production design: Roger K. Furse. Film editing: Helga Cranston. Music: Georges Auric.

Only a couple of years after Otto Preminger's adaptation of Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse was released to critical and box office indifference, filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni would make their international reputations with films about moneyed Europeans fighting vainly the old ennui. In fact, Bonjour Tristesse is not so very much different in content from movies like Antonioni's L'Avventura and Fellini's La Dolce Vita, both of which rocketed to success in 1960. They're all about what today we might call "Eurotrash" -- people with too much money and not enough to occupy their souls. Preminger's film was hindered a bit by the censors, who forbade any explicit descriptions of what was going on between Raymond (David Niven) and his several mistresses, much less any extrapolation about his exceptionally close relationship with his daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg). And the casting of the British Niven and Deborah Kerr and the American Jean Seberg as characters meant to be très French, feels more than a little off-base. There's also some heavy-handed telegraphing of the film's message, summed up in a title song by composer Georges Auric with lyrics by screenwriter Arthur Laurents that's sung by Juliette Gréco in a Paris boîte. But Bonjour Tristesse has gained in favor over the years, no longer dismissed as a complete misfire. Mylène Demongeot adds some much needed comic relief in the form of Elsa, Raymond's sunburned mistress, a necessary counterpoint to Cecile's existential angst. Auric's score provides a continental flavor to the film, and Georges Périnal's cinematography makes the most of locations, especially the Paris that's viewed in monochrome as contrasted with the Technicolor vividness of the Riviera. Since the film is told from the point of view of Seberg's Cecile, the place where she feels depressed and regretful is necessarily more drab than the place where she had a brief encounter with something like freedom and power. It's Paris as Kansas and the Riviera as Oz, but without the "no place like home" nostalgia.