A young girl living in a mildly incestuous relationship with her father on the French Riviera, plots to get rid of her father's fiancee who she feels will come between them.
Otto Preminger and the writer Arthur Laurents are responsible for this very turgid drama. But the chief bad guy is Preminger a director not known for his light touch. Today, Preminger has a fairly serious following as an auteur among certain film intellectuals. Preminger was one of the early adapters of widescreen and on location photography. Preminger preferred to have his actors perform in actual locales which he felt added to the authenticity of the film. Bonjour Tristesse features lots of photography in France using that old Wizard of Oz trick of switching between black and white and color.
Preminger was also a noted stage director and much of the acting in his films always seems very stagy and forced at times. The rare exceptions were people like James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder and in Bonjour Tristesse Deborah Kerr, who probably gives the best performance in the film. Overall though, the level of acting is really awful. It was almost as if the actors couldn't perform naturally in actual natural locations.
The chief acting offender in Bonjour Tristesse is Jean Seberg, a Preminger discovery with an extremely limited if almost nonexistent range. She has to carry the entire film since she is in about every scene. As the old joke goes, she runs the range of emotions from A to B. Seberg was never much of an actor and never really had much of a career, including Breathless which was really a Godard film not a Belmondo/Seberg film.
Alfred Hitchcock had a saying that he never made films about really rich people because he couldn't figure out when or where they went to the bathroom. It is nearly impossible for an audience to relate to the superficial problems of the very rich in this film. In the case of Bonjour Tristesse, Hitchcock probably nailed it on the head.
94 minutes.
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