Bonjour Tristesse

Director: Otto Preminger, Otto Preminger, Otto Preminger

1958 / 94min / DCP

Jean Seberg, in the role that inspired Jean-Luc Godard to cast her in Breathless, plays the flighty, irresponsible, self-absorbed teen daughter of graying playboy David Niven, sabotaging her father’s affair with prim dress designer Deborah Kerr, in Preminger and screenwriter Arthur Laurents’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, published when author Françoise Sagan was only 18. Photographed in gorgeous Technicolor (save for its black-and-white prologue and epilogue) on the summertime French Riviera, Preminger’s exacting Scope compositions and serpentine sequence shots lend a cool, objective distance to the melodramatic material, elevating it into a treatise on the ultimate mystery of human motives.