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Bonjour Tristesse Is Lovely and Unconvincing
This new adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s iconic novel gets the look right, but its characterizations are off the mark.
Gently updating Françoise Sagan’s generational 1954 best seller, Chew-Bose fills her frame with sun-dappled bodies and faces, tasteful outfits, elegant spaces, and the easygoing languor that comes with the seaside sojourns of the wealthy. Sagan’s slender tale of the toxic bond between a 17-year-old girl and her playboy father was a literary sensation in its day for the way the author, 18 at the time of publication, conveyed the corrosive and self-absorbed carelessness of a teenager for whom people came to seem like toys to be played with and manipulated. He’s in the midst of a casually torrid romance with the beautiful, earthy Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), when into their lives arrives Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a well-known fashion designer who was also his late wife’s closest friend.
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