Popular reviews

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  Review by k(arst)en ★★★★ 15

  While I may only be two films deep in an expansive career, it’s clear as day that Otto Preminger was a filmmaker years ahead of his time. His framing and use of space took full advantage of what the wide screen format had to offer and that other filmmakers weren’t able to fully realize quite yet. I still don’t believe the black and white sequences in this film are from 1958. While Anatomy displayed his ability to use these framing techniques to tell a compelling narrative, Bonjour Tristesse feels looser and hell of a lot more psychological. Jean Seberg’s enigmatic screen presence mixed with the often vibrant cinematography makes for what is a pretty delusional experience. I wish I felt…

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  Review by r_emmet ★★★★½

  A tragic film about skin care. No matter the defenses, there will be sunburns and wrinkles and age. Even the immaculate Jean Seberg slathers face cream onto her cheeks. Preminger choreographs these narcissists in the most astonishingly complex widescreen compositions in his career. Privileged moment: the maid chugging a beer at the extreme left edge, as main characters natter about a casino in the middle ground.

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  Review by Davi_1966 ★★★★★

  There is nothing as melancholic or painful as to finally know who you really are.

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  Review by b rad ★★★★½ 7

  Jean-Luc Godard semi-joked how this was the prequel to Breathless, and indeed a "3 Years Later" after the final shot would tie the two in nicely. But firstly, what a gorgeous film. Segments are alternatively in both black and white for the present day (which I can't remember being used like this in another mainstream film) and colour for the flashback, and both are beautifully shot in obviously different ways. Sleek shadows and elegant bar dresses and such in the black and white, and garish CinemaScope melodrama for the flashback, evocative of the Sirk films of the same era. The French Riviera is a beautiful setting and the colour and vibrancy is so well juxtaposed to the black and white…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½

  Preminger was the most psychologically probing filmmaker of Hollywood's classic period, and a filmmaker who managed to craft impeccably blocked, supremely beautiful shots while still racking focus on the subtle displays of characters' roiling interior worlds. Bonjour Tristesse may be second only to Daisy Kenyon as Preminger's most intuitive multi-character study, presenting us with an opulent façade of wealth and playboy idyll that is slowly undermined by both the marginalia of Preminger's vast frames and the increasing chaos beneath the actors' carefree surfaces.

  Niven is so great as the father even more childish than his spoiled daughter (Seberg, pitched perfectly between Old Hollywood and New Wave in her performance, at once declarative in the classical sense and in the ironic…

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  Review by Jon ★★★ 2

  surprised that Luca Guadagnino hasn't remade this yet

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★★ 4

  (recém revisto na Cinemateca Portuguesa)

  A Jean Seberg aplicando a máscara ao rosto no final.

  E a persistência do olhar do Preminger sobre essa vontade que as personagens têm de se apagarem inventando para si mesmas máscaras, umas após as outras (é isso o que dita as construções dos seus filmes, e é isso o que os torna singulares no contexto do que se fazia em Hollywood), qualquer coisa que as afaste de um passado que termina por encobrir tudo (é o que o preto e branco faz aqui) e situa as suas ações num presente eterno, máscaras e passados que encerram as personagens nessa interiorização que de Laura ao Saint Joan fez do Preminger o cineasta do mistério e…

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  Review by Lara Pop ★★★ 11

  #Nivarathon No. 13.

  Man, Jean Seberg ruined this movie for me. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but her every movement felt fabricated and terribly unnatural. I felt as if she hadn't played a character but played an actor playing a character instead, if I'm making any sense at all. She didn't embrace her character, she didn't become her; instead she played a rigid, stiff somebody who tried to strike the right chord by woodenly reciting her lines but who was irremediably out of tune. Gosh, it was awful. I felt painfully aware of her forced line delivery, her fake inflection, her bogus smile and the fact that she completely undermined the authenticity of this movie. And Bonjour Tristesse is the kind of movie that would have badly needed it. It's infuriating. The concept, the setting, Otto Preminger's surehanded direction, David Niven... this could have been ace without her. Well, adieu tristesse, I guess.

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★★

  3rd Otto Preminger (after Anatomy of a Murder and Laura)

  More UC practice watching leads me to this adaptation of a rather infamous French novel, written when the author was only a teenager. Sagan went on to write other books and plays, but this would be her immortal epitaph. Beloved of the French New Wave, the adaptation is a weird film in a number of ways, not least for the relationship at the centre of its drama. Cécile is, at the start of the film, an 18 year old suffering from a severe sense of anhedonia. Through flashbacks, it's revealed that she conspired to end the relationship between Raymond, her philandering father and Anne, her dead mother's best friend, because…

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  Review by russman ★★★½ 2

  Remember to put on your sunscreen

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★½

  cecile referring to something stupid as an “epidemic”. girl, if you only knew!

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★

  "You two don't even need words—the perfect marriage."

  A moralist is brought low through social intercourse with a dissolute father and daughter combo.

  Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse is an intriguing (if overly sanitized) vision of the dysfunction wrought by Freudian sexual urges. Cecile (19-year-old Jean Seberg in her second film role) has a raging Elektra complex for her rake father (Raymond, a devilishly fun David Niven) which they conspire not to acknowledge via a ceaseless series of casual affairs on the French Riviera. Turbulence ensues when Raymond has his head turned by a former flame with serious intentions. As said flame the incomparable Deborah Kerr is sadly forced into a stuffy, priggish role.

  The film is lovely to look at…