Otto Preminger’s take on the Françoise Sagan’s novel finds the right tone despite the drawback of censorship limitations and Englanders and Americans playing French characters. CinemaScope and Technicolor on Saint-Tropez locations help, but the big plus is the radiant presence of Preminger’s discovery Jean Seberg as Sagan’s amoral heroine Cécile. David Niven is the father Cécile adores, and Deborah Kerr the romantic interloper that she can’t abide. We have to imagine the decadent details, yet the picture feels like something new, progressive. Music by Georges Auric; Juliette Gréco sings.

Bonjour Tristesse
Region B Blu-ray
Powerhouse Indicator
1958 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date August 18, 2025 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £21.00
Starring: Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Jean Seberg, Mylène Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, Juliette Gréco, Walter Chiari, Martita Hunt, Roland Culver, Jean Kent, David Oxley, Tutte Lemkow.
Cinematography: Georges Périnal
Production Designer: Roger Furse
Art Director: Ray Simm
Titles and logo design: Saul Bass
Costumes: Givenchy; Jewelry: Cartier
Film Editor: Helga Cranston
Music Composer: Georges Auric
Screenplay Written by Arthur Laurents from the novel by Françoise Sagan
Produced and Directed by Otto Preminger

Françoise Sagan’s novel was big news in the 1950s, popularizing the existence of an affluent French ‘smart set’ that had the luxury of leaving older social rules behind. At least 4 versions have been made including one just last year. The critical consensus is that the newest effort doesn’t measure up to Otto Preminger’s vintage version, made back when the erotic content of the story had to be kept on the margins. It’s certainly not perfect, but it has something unique — Jean Seberg in top form.

French film critics must have flipped when one of their favorite Hollyood auteurs Otto Preminger took on Françoise Sagan’s confessional-declaratory novel Bonjour Tristesse, to be produced in the English language, with non-French actors in leading roles. Given that handicap, David Niven and Deborah Kerr couldn’t be bettered as a wealthy Paris playboy and an opinionated fashion designer. The French locations are genuine, at least. The real compensation is Preminger’s discovery Jean Seberg, as the daughter growing up within an odd set of privileged, decadent values. Lensed by cinematographer Georges Périnal and quite impressive in CinemaScope, Bonjour Tristesse is an awkward but beautiful film that won a loyal band of devotees, including the critics of the French New Wave.

Very apparent in 1958 was Otto Preminger’s non-judgmental attitude to the material. The show does not billboard preachy sentiments, or offer a character that serves as a moral spokesperson. We can’t dismiss Jean Seberg’s flighty teenager as a simple delinquent, who needs to be put on a tighter leash.

The acting and personalities in Tristesse are guaranteed to hold our attention. The pampered Parisienne Cécile (Jean Seberg) wins boyfriends with ease but just as easily drops them when she becomes bored. She sees little incentive to do anything but enjoy the nightlife and have a good time. But while pacing a dance floor with Jacques (David Oxley) she becomes sad when remembering the events of the previous summer… In St. Tropez, Cécile and her father Raymond (David Niven) loll about a seaside villa pursuing suntans, swimming and the night life. Raymond frolics with his latest casual girlfriend, Elsa (Mylène Demongeot).

Our first thought is that Raymond is a bad influence on the teenaged Cécile, what with all the sun and nights spent drinking, dancing and gambling in town. They are very close and affectionate to one another. They have housemaids to wait on them, beautiful wardrobes and fancy cars to drive. Neither Cécile nor Raymond care that she’s flunked out of school. She jokes that the locals deem them ‘wicked people from Paris.’ Cécile is not exactly the image of propriety, but she’s certainly her own person.

Cécile’s ‘good time’ is spoiled when Raymond’s old flame fashion designer Anne Larson (Deborah Kerr) shows up. Elsa soon finds that it’s time to leave. The exact nature of Raymond’s earlier relationship with the always-formal Anne remains unclear. Soon they are engaged, and the fun stops: Anne takes charge, insisting that Cécile bear down on her studies, and cutting off the teenager’s flirtation with the handsome young neighbor Philippe (Geoffrey Horne, of  Bridge on the River Kwai). The normally lax Raymond accedes to Anne’s new regime. Cécile feels abandoned by her father, who is once again treating her like a child. The headstrong teenager is not the type to be manipulated by anybody. To her thinking, it’s Anne that needs to be gotten rid of.

Otto Preminger’s pursuit of Bonjour Tristesse began in 1955. His next picture  Anatomy of a Murder would begin a streak of prestigious hits, but in 1957 Preminger was considered a hit-or-miss director who made  Laura and then receded into murky melodramas and poorly-conceived pictures like  The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. Preminger’s Joan of Arc picture was criticized for his casting of American Jean Seberg in a role way over her abilities. But the director didn’t give up on his discovery: Seberg’s performance as Cécile confirmed her as a new star, at least in Europe.

To adapt the Françoise Sagan novel Preminger hired the revered playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents ( Rope,  Anastasia). Bonjour Tristesse suffers as would any racy French novel made to conform to 1950s Hollywood standards. The sleeping arrangements at villa Raymond are made chaste and proper, as Elsa has her own room. To pre-empt what should be an active sex relationship with Raymond, she’s been given a severe sunburn. The book’s references to Cécile’s budding sex life is sidelined as well. The closest thing to an orgy is a line of drunken dancers down at the resort town. Everyone keeps their clothes on and the conversation stays above board.

Preminger successfully establishes that Cécile and Raymond share a strong mutual affection. The maids disapprove of their hugging and kissing, yet their relationship is just close, not physically incestuous. Powerhouse’s essayist Peter Cowie relates the film’s dynamic to that of Preminger’s earlier  Angel Face, wherein the spoiled daughter Jean Simmons considers murder to monopolize her father’s affections. We also note Deborah Kerr’s later horror film  The Innocents, in which she plays a literal nanny, imposing her personal insecurities on her adolescent charges. As far as Cécile is concerned, Anne Larson is monopolizing her father. Cécile’s response is so natural, it’s almost involuntary. She doesn’t realize that her scheming is dangerous.

Bonjour Tristesse accomplishes lot considering the uphill battle Preminger and Laurents must fight. The disc commentators remark on the film’s ‘avant garde’ feel, but casual viewers often find it as awkward as any Hollywood item attempting a European flavor. Authenticity is just not possible when the spoken language is English and the main actors are all English or American. No matter how good the acting or how authentic the locations, none of it seems French. The movie looks to be largely post-dubbed, although the looping is excellent. In this context the authentic accents of Walter Chiari and the pert Mylène Demongeot almost come off like speech impediments.

Censorship mutes the daring aspect of Françoise Sagan’s novel, much the way the Production Code wiped out much of the context that explains Holly Golightly in  Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Cécile talks about ‘the wicked people from Paris’ but nothing scandalous appears on screen. Our natural response is to assume that Raymond is sleeping with his lady friends, and that Cécile and Raymond may be getting cozy off-screen. But plausible deniability is maintained.

The glossy Hollywood production works against against the film’s avant-garde quality. Shots in cars with artificial rear projection block comparisons with the French New Wave. Preminger’s escapade into chic European cinema comes complete with a fancy flashback structure, a memory motivated by Cécile’s melancholy voiceover, a construction common to soapy melodramas. As it is, the transition into the main flashback feels too abrupt. The fancy opticals morphing from silvery B&W to color, and back again, are very distracting. Viewers in 1958 may not have been listening to Cécile’s voiceover narration.

Tristesse may be the first major Hollywood film to use the absence of color to distinguish between present reality and flashbacks to the past. The Wizard of Oz is a precedent, if we substitute an alternate dream world, and sepia tone. Both films are mainly in color, with bookends in monochrome. Click your heels together, Cécile!

The ‘present time’ Paris scenes are all in B&W. To add to the atmosphere, the authentic existentialist entertainer Juliette Gréco sings Georges Auric’s downbeat title tune in a nightclub. But having her sing in English only adds to the impression of ‘ersatz French movie.’  Greco was currently being groomed for major stardom by an even bigger Hollywood name, Darryl Zanuck, in John Huston’s 1958  The Roots of Heaven.

The actress Jean Seberg had picked up a lot of life experience in one year. She is effortlessly convincing as a carefree woman living La Dolce Vita on daddy’s money; she is the main reason to see the movie. Some American reviewers still considered Seberg to be ‘Preminger’s Folly,’ whereas the critics of the French New Wave embraced her whole-heartedly. Ms. Seberg did the best she could with an erratic career. She must have had a commitment for another performance for Columbia, for she appeared in the next year’s  The Mouse that Roared as a standard girlfriend accessory for star Peter Sellers. One of her best performances came 5 years later in Robert Parrish’s Paris-set  In the French Style, opposite Stanley Baker.

Is it possible that Paris saw Tristesse dubbed into French?  The veddy English Roland Culver and Jean Kent are Mr. and Mrs. Lombard, and Londoner David Oxley ( The Hound of the Baskervilles) is Jacques, Cécile’s handsome dance partner. Martita Hunt is so good as Philippe’s card-playing mother, we don’t care that she’s not French. Ms. Hunt made her mark in numerous classics, from  Great Expectations to  The Brides of Dracula.

Goateed choreographer Tutte Lemkow can be seen dancing in the nightclub party sequence; his interesting looks must have served him well in auditions because he shows up around this time in many Columbia pictures, such as The Guns of Navarone. As a choreographer Lemkow later engineered the complex bal des vampires in Roman Polanski’s  The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Fans of Bonjour Tristesse are unconcerned with any of the drawbacks noted above — the show does convey some of the spirit of the Sagan book. The central drama functions well, and Jean Seberg’s performance could not be improved. Tristesse may be to Otto Preminger what Marnie is to Alfred Hitchcock: point out its supposed flaws to a committed fan, and they’ll likely assert that they love the film more because of those supposed flaws.

Powerhouse Indicator’s Region B Blu-ray of Bonjour Tristesse is a new remaster said to be accomplished with a 4K scan; it’s a marked improvement on Columbia’s older HD master, that we were lucky to get on a fine Twilight Time disc back in 2012. This new iteration is cleaner and with slightly brighter colors. The opticals to mix B&W and color are very clean. Preminger’s first Technicolor transition sees little sections of the B&W screen turning to color and then receding, before finally committing to a dissolve to full color.

It’s Region B, which U.S. customers need to know won’t play on domestic Blu-ray players. I repeat that fact because buyers can easily order too quickly and get burned. But we still want to review discs that only multi-region fans can see.

Original prints were in Technicolor and CinemaScope. An early shot of the Paris skyline is an excellent place to see the field distortion of CinemaScope lenses: as the view pans, parts of the frame squeeze and unsqueeze slightly, especially at the left and right extremes. We previously noticed many instances of the phenom of the CinemaScope Mumps — in close-ups, faces tended to squash out horizontally. Were we seeing less of the effect on this version?  A few disc transfers (mainly  this Disney movie) have experimented with ‘re-squeezing’ shots to correct the Mump distortion.

The audio track is monaural. By 1958 few ‘scope films were still being released in 4-track stereo, and most were from Fox. One of Powerhouse’s smart moves is to replicate the Isolated Music score track first heard on the older Twilight Time Disc.

The reason for us Americans to invest in these foreign discs is often the extras, and Powerhouse never disappoints. There’s always the excellent  Foster Hirsch book on Otto Preminger, but the commentary and interview pieces here give us additional opinions. The expert Glenn Kenney and Farran Smith Nehme handle a full commentary that covers the basics — there’s a lot to consider about Preminger’s sometimes cruel direction, especially in his handling of his sensitive discovery Jean Seberg. In describing the New Wave critics’ praise for Bonjour Tristesse, Kenny title-drops Rivette’s  Paris Belongs to Us as a good look at a less glamorous slice of life on the Left Bank, with no vacations in the South.

Critic Geoff Andrew contributes a spirited analysis of the movie. Our favorite piece is an interview with Denis Westhoff, the son of the late François Sagan. He gives a full accounting of the 16 year-old prodigy whose novel took Paris by storm. He says that her publisher grilled her to assure himself that she was the true author. Westhoff offers another insight about the book’s impact, explaining that the Catholic Church came down hard on Bonjour Tristess because its heroine takes active advantage of (pre- The Pill) contraceptives to enjoy a ‘sinful’ sex life. The condemnation only made Sagan’s book more of a must-read.

Powerhouse also includes the trailer that begins with an interview with Sagan, who looks a little bit like Jean Seberg. Even in this promotional format Sagan tries to duck some of the questions. After a B&W opening, the trailer finishes in color as a standard Coming Attractions reel.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Bonjour Tristesse
Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme (2025)
Interview featurette A Good Bet with actor Jeremy Burnham (2017, 5 mins)
Interview featurette Tristesse de vivre with writer and critic Geoff Andrew (2025, 22 mins)
Intervew featurette A Charming Little Monster with Denis Westhoff, on the novel written by his mother Françoise Sagan (2016, 14 mins)
Isolated music and effects track
Original theatrical trailer, which includes interview material with Françoise Sagan (1958, 5 mins)
Image gallery
40-page illustrated insert booklet with an essay by Peter Cowie, writing about the source novel and its adaptation, archival materials, and an overview of contemporary critical responses.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Region B Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: August 14, 2025
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