Set in the countryside of France during the summertime, “Bonjour Tristesse” follows the father-daughter duo of Cécile and Raymond. The quiet slice of life for the top 1 percent follows these two as they tackle love in their villa worth well over a couple of million dollars.
Raymond, the widowed father, tries to balance being a father with his love for the eccentric Elsa. Meanwhile, Cécile, the lost college student, deals with her budding adventures with the birds and the bees, entangling herself with her crooner boyfriend Cyril.
This cast of characters gets shaken up when one night, Raymond, out of the blue, asks his old friend Anne to stay with them over the summer. Instantly, the audience is thrown into the drama of these wealthy people, who are supposed to feel for them as they try to navigate life. The troupe doesn’t work for three months straight and instead deals with moral problems that could be solved if they all just acted like real people.
The dialogue throughout the film is as like reading a middle schooler’s Tumblr thread. The actors desperately try to act through the clumsy dialogue, and for the most part, fall flat on their faces. The only moment of reprieve the audience gets from the poor writing is in moments of jest or fun, and for those few minutes, I was convinced this movie could work.
Too frequently, though, these moments end, and the audience is forcefully thrown back into the long, trudging, “artistic” scenes that are cut off before anything real can be said.
The directing and blocking are just as awkward as the dialogue, and the only saving grace from the horrible behind-the-scenes actions is the gorgeous sets. The production design made me want to suddenly acquire millions of dollars and run off to the French countryside to lounge by the sea and eat bread and butter all day.
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Watching the 110-minute film, it seemed to be made exclusively for aesthetic purposes. The theater was often filled with artsy French music, which I will say was amazing, and do make sure to check out their score because it kept me going throughout the whole thing, as well as skinny, mostly beautiful-looking people lounging and doing rich people things in a beautiful setting.
The shots were almost all aesthetically pleasing, but with a lack of meat in the plot, it felt as though the filmmakers just took a long photo shoot and filmed everything, even the boring drama between the models.
Although these scenes are beautiful, I did find at times that the film fell victim to a plague that has been infiltrating and killing a lot of movies recently: the color grading effect. What I can only assume are beautifully vibrant places in real life are sometimes saturated enough in this film that they are almost depressing, making a lot of the shots look dead. This, along with the writing and the aesthetics, made the film drag the further I got into it.
The mother-daughter relationships between Cécile and Elsa and Cécile and Anne are interesting. I would have loved to see those three women together more. They had interesting reflective moments that seemed to be treated with less care than the artistic shots.
Looking at these three women, and even Raymond and Cyril, the whole cast had a perfect, kind of odd, eccentric look. The casting director did a perfect job with this, complementing, again, the aesthetics of the film. But what are aesthetics if you don’t say anything real?