Bonjour Tristesse: On the Riviera with Otto Preminger

With two new biographies published in the last two years and a 23-film retrospective at the Film Forum in New York in 2008, Otto Preminger has undergone a major critical re-evaluation. Of the dozen or so films of Preminger's I've seen, only two—Laura (1944) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)—impressed me as outstanding movies, both of them highly entertaining works that tell dramatic, compelling stories performed by charismatic actors. As for the rest, nearly all struck me as uneven mixtures of strengths and flaws, often self-important "projects" whose artistic aspirations outstrip Preminger's ability to deal with their subjects.

One of Preminger's movies that was tepidly received upon its release but has recently gained a group of ardent admirers is Bonjour Tristesse (1958). In an article on the Film Forum retrospective, Nick Pinkerton of the Village Voice called the movie "one of the decade's great under appreciated films." David Thomson writes of the film's "brilliance." Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema, calls it one of Preminger's "masterpieces." Having recently seen Bonjour Tristesse for the first time, I'm afraid I can't concur with such extravagant praise. Like most of the Preminger films I've seen, it strikes me as a mixed bag, a movie whose source, a novel about amoral Continental sensualists by the French writer Françoise Sagan, seems a strange match for Preminger's rather stern Teutonic-American sensibility.

The movie takes place during one summer on the French Riviera as Raymond (David Niven), a middle-aged businessman, his young mistress Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), and his 17-year old daughter Cécile (Jean Seberg) vacation there. These three have a bizarre relationship. The father and daughter have an extremely close—it would not be inaccurate to call it quasi-incestuous—relationship; after a while, the frequent scenes of them kissing each other on the lips become quite unsettling. Raymond and Elsa apparently occupy separate bedrooms, although this might simply be a fiction to placate the servants (or the censors). These people are decadent jet-setters: they do little else but party, booze, laze around on the beach, and gamble at the casino. Raymond is apparently a serial philanderer and Elsa a vacuous gold digger. Cécile, who has just failed her exams, is spoiled, aimless, and self-absorbed.

Into this eccentric household comes Anne (Deborah Kerr), the chic fashion-designer best friend of Cécile's mother (whom we assume to be dead). Anne soon displaces Elsa and becomes engaged to Raymond. Anne seems to be a bit of a prude who believes that Cécile has had too little parental control and attempts to set boundaries for her behavior, making her study to resit her exams and forbidding her from seeing her 25-year old boyfriend Philippe, another idle jet-setter vacationing with his mother in a nearby villa. Cécile, bridling at the restrictions placed on her and intensely jealous of Anne's relationship with her father, then concocts a plot with her boyfriend to break up the engagement. She succeeds, but with tragic results.

The movie is narrated in voice-over by Cécile and framed as a series of long flashbacks recalling the events of that summer. Scenes of the present are shot in black-and-white. These take place in Paris and generally show her carousing at discos and a night club where an almost campy theme song (was Preminger trying to replicate Laura?) is performed by Juliette Greco. The flashbacks to the Riviera are shot in color. (The photography is by the great Georges Périnal, and the Riviera scenes, with their glorious settings and brilliant Mediterranean colors, are ravishingly beautiful.) The movie ends with Cécile discussing with her father plans to return to the South in the summer with Raymond's new mistress—this time, in view of the events that happened the year before on the French Riviera, to the Italian Riviera. The final scene shows Cécile sitting dispiritedly in front of her dressing table mirror, tears streaming down her face.

Andrew Sarris, a longtime admirer of Preminger, calls the film both a comedy ("a Gallic romp"!) and "a tragedy of time and illusion." In doing so, he identifies one of the weirdest things about this movie: its mixture of incongruous tones and oddly arbitrary shifts between them. Overall, the movie—with its melancholic narration by Cécile, strong element of fatalism, and downer ending—seems to be aiming for solemn tragedy, and that is certainly the tone it ends on in that final scene of Cécile in front of the mirror.

Yet it starts off rather flippantly, with Raymond and Cécile joking around on the beach, and returns to that flippant tone from time to time. Raymond's mistress Elsa is portrayed as buffoonish, more ridiculous than comical. In a long sequence at the casino, she gets drunk and impulsively takes up with a South American playboy, amidst much banter with Cécile and Philippe, after she realizes that Raymond is about to dump her for Anne. Much of the lifestyle of the jet-setters is portrayed almost satirically. Then there is the housekeeper. She is forever claiming to be sick and sending one of her two similar-looking sisters with a similar-sounding name as a substitute, leading to a running joke about which of the sisters is working today.

Sarris makes much of Preminger's non-judgmental attitude toward the events and characters in his movies, what he calls Preminger's "ambiguity and objectivity . . . the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other." Yet I certainly don't get that sense from Bonjour Tristesse: too much in the film seems to contradict this view. Preminger portrays all the characters in the movie except Anne as vain, shallow, and jaded. Moreover, he seems to believe that the result of this self-centered way of life is moral and psychic stagnation for those living it, a stunting of emotions and empathy, and an existence of joyless hedonism. For those who come into contact with them, the result is tragedy. I infer from this attitude a clear sense of moral judgment.

Even the alternation between black-and-white and Technicolor seems to me to reinforce this sense of judgment. Sarris was the originator of the Preminger-as-neutral-observer concept, which, of course, to him gives Preminger a consistent cinematic point of view and therefore entitles him to auteur status. (In The American Cinema he places Preminger just below his "pantheon directors," in the same class as directors like Anthony Mann, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, and Preston Sturges.) Sarris writes that "Bonjour Tristesse . . . is transformed by Preminger's color/black-and-white duality into a tragedy of time and illusion."

To me that's overstating the case. This duality is in one sense a strictly functional gimmick: it cues the viewer whether events are taking place in the present (black-and-white) or the past (color). But this stylistic choice also implies that Cécile's present is colorless and drained of the potential for real happiness, whereas her more innocent past was vivid and hopeful. To me the "color/black-and-white duality" indicates more than just a subjective attitude on Cécile's part; it indicates a judgment on the part of the director toward those events in the past. In its milieu and subject, Bonjour Tristesse in many ways resembles Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's L'Avventura. Yet Antonioni and even Fellini seem detached from the decadence depicted in their movies in a way that Preminger doesn't. Far from maintaining neutrality, Preminger seems to be condemning the characters and their actions. This is the attitude of a moralist, not a disinterested observer.

Fellini's movie in particular makes an interesting comparison. Like Bonjour Tristesse, La Dolce Vita is in some ways a morality play, one in which forces of good and evil compete for control of the main character. One reason La Dolce Vita works so well is that the character of Marcello is essentially a moral cipher who avoids committing himself to either of the opposing forces competing for his soul. In Cécile, Bonjour Tristesse has no such unformed, neutral main character. Cécile seems already to have devoted herself to her sybaritic lifestyle and, despite her despair at the end, to have no intention of altering the way she lives. If she feels remorse at the fate of Anne, she nevertheless seems equally to feel relief that she can continue unchallenged her way of life and her close relationship with her father.

Cécile is, in fact, the only character in the movie who rings true, who seems to have any substance at all. Niven is very good at playing this type, but that's all his character is—a familiar type—and given the Continental setting, a curiously British one at that, a sort of dissipated version of the British "silly ass." It's hard to believe he's a rich and successful businessman, so ineffectual does he seem about anything beyond his immediate pleasure. Neither is the divine Kerr, as a woman caught up in a situation she doesn't understand, given much to create a fully defined character from. She does make a gorgeous clothes horse and is always the essence of chic appearance and civilized behavior, but little more. Adding to the vagueness of Raymond and Anne is the fact that no serious attempt is ever made to explain or make believable the unlikely emotional and physical attraction between the two. Some of the minor characters—the South American playboy, Philippe's mother (the great Martita Hunt), and especially Elsa—come awfully close to caricature.

The people in Bonjour Tristesse feel synthetic, more the product of imagination than of experience or close observation. The movie seems the creation of a filmmaker trying with only partial success to deal with intricacies of behavior and motivation that he has little understanding of. Preminger shows us people and their actions without offering any real insight into either. Some might see this as a positive thing, might call it objectivity or ambiguity, might praise it as an indicator of stylistic identity. I don't.

I wonder if it is instead the result of an intellect too perfunctory to analyze complexities of character and plot thoroughly, too casual to do more than present a surface view of people and events. Antonioni and Fellini managed to make movies about superficial people leading superficial lives that were not superficial movies. Antonioni gave his films depth with the evocative force of his astonishing images, Fellini by probing beneath the surface of his characters to suggest latent depths. In Bonjour Tristesse, though, Preminger's images seem beautiful yet empty, his characters shallow not only in nature but also in conception. For me the movie's superficiality and slickness unintentionally mirror those same traits in the characters and events it depicts. Bonjour Tristesse is not without its virtues, but there is no way I would call it a masterpiece. Like so much of Preminger's work, it is a film of major aspirations and modest accomplishments.

Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.

Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.

The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.

The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.

The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.

Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.

One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.

Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.

As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.