Becoming a Woman Who Screams

Gabrielle McClellan watches Durga Chew-Bose’s debut feature film “Bonjour Tristesse.”

By Gabrielle McClellanJune 2, 2025

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

“ARE YOU DEAD?”

On a rocky, sun-soaked beach in the French Riviera, the camera pans to a flotsam-like lump of towels in the opening scene of Bonjour Tristesse (2024), where the question—“Are you dead?”—is posed softly from somewhere off camera. Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), a lithe, tanned young man with the features of a Greco-Roman bust, asks this question in jest to his summer fling, the teenage Cécile (Lily McInerny), who is lying under the towels. He laughs and removes the towels, then the camera shifts to the bucolic scene of their summer love.

But this scene is a rare moment of bliss. Durga Chew-Bose’s new adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novella Bonjour Tristesse (translated: “Hello, Sadness”) follows the spirit of its title. A tale of bad romance doomed from the start, Chew-Bose’s directorial debut is a love letter to Sagan’s stifling coming-of-age novella, a uniquely teenage bildungsroman of self-loathing. In the same vein as And God Created Woman (dir. Roger Vadim, 1956), the French Riviera of Sagan’s novella is full of lustful debauchery masquerading as continental sophistication. Seventeen-year-old Cécile is vacationing with her widower father Raymond (Claes Bang), whose latest inamorata, the much-younger dancer Elsa Mackenbourg (Naïlia Harzoune), completes their slanted family triangle. When an old friend of Cécile’s mother, elegant and platinum blonde fashion designer Anne Larsen (Chloë Sevigny), joins their vacation, the peace and paganism of summer is interrupted. Anne, determined to mother the strong-minded and unstudious Cécile, grows closer to Raymond, while Cécile, bent on preserving her debauched vacation, hatches a plan to get rid of Anne. Sagan’s novella is a critique of hedonism and the self-indulgent leisure class: “My love of pleasure and happiness constitutes the only consistent aspect of my character,” narrates Cécile (in Heather Lloyd’s translation).

Chew-Bose’s new adaptation begins with a distorted nuclear family. Cécile, Raymond, and Elsa enjoy late-night dinners, days lounging on the beach, and dance sessions on the patio. Cécile sneaks off to sail and swim and enjoy the company of Cyril. She listens to music on her cell phone while sunbathing. She scrapes sticks of butter right onto toast before dashing off to sea. In other words, she is a girl on summer vacation. Our introduction to Cécile in the film is as a moody but affectionate child, a girl who plays dead on the beach in one scene, then hops onto her father’s back and dances with him a few scenes later. Indeed, the opening credits begins as an assortment of colorful blocks patterned in pastels before landing in a swath of teal and dun, a childlike puzzle of beach scenes.

Chew-Bose’s film, however, is less interested in the vivid and halcyon pleasures of adolescent summers. For many scenes, we remain in the dark. After opening on the beach and sailing along the coast, we move to the shadows, where, in the shade of pines on the patio, Raymond practices his plier movements while Elsa corrects his form. Soon the dark-haired Cécile, who observes them from the window of the house, joins in, jumps on her father’s back again as the trio dance to an upbeat, jazzy tune; she is 17 and she hasn’t grown up. But it is Cécile out of reach, perched in the window and watching happiness unfold, that defines Chew-Bose’s vision of girlhood: Cécile is caught between the dark and frightening annals of her own mind and the expectations that other, seemingly happier people put on her. At times, she picks through seashells collected on the beach or lounges in solitude in the patio’s shade; she is a character who resists letting us into her mind, a pensive, thoughtful version of Sagan’s Cécile. With womanhood approaching from one side, the comforts of childhood from the other, Chew-Bose’s Cécile is frozen between two worlds.

The landscape of the film is beautiful, populated with piney vegetation that is lush yet sharp, at times uninviting. With broad, vivid shots of rocky cliff faces and seas heaving with whitecaps, the Riviera is hardly depicted as a soft, gentle place. Each shot is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), in which beastly waves crash onto steep, cragged Aeolian shorelines, and the scenic bliss soon turns dangerous. Indeed, the beaches in Bonjour Tristesse are harsh and uncomfortable; something unpleasant always lurks in each shot, whether it is the rocks, cliffs, or Cécile’s quiet, penetrating stare. Chew-Bose’s landscape captures a thorny but invigorating adolescence, with the camera isolating us from Cécile’s interiority.

Chew-Bose’s pensive and resistant female protagonist belongs alongside those of fellow art-house directors Céline Sciamma and Dea Kulumbegashvili. In Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), the stormy, beautiful young woman awaiting an impending arranged marriage, is often passing out of view down corridors, turning her cheek, or, like Cécile, perched at the edge of a cliff staring out to sea. The first we see of her is the back of her head as we and the protagonist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) follow her to the bracing Breton seaside. Héloïse refuses to let us observe her, to let us pry into her private thoughts. Sciamma, like Chew-Bose, uses silence and absence to create a character’s resistance, both to her circumstances and, brushing against the fourth wall, to us as viewers.

Director Kulumbegashvili, whose second feature film April premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2024, takes this absence and silence to another extreme with long, still shots of the backs of characters’ heads or the corners of rooms. The film follows April (Ia Sukhitashvili), an ob-gyn, through the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains as she performs clandestine abortions on women in villages. What the camera does not see speaks to the secretive and suppressed nature of the women’s stories at the heart of the film. With Bonjour Tristesse, Chew-Bose joins the ranks of female directors who take solitude and silence as a means to turn the cinematic apparatus into a tool for protecting women’s privacy rather than inviting exploitation.

Chew-Bose’s long, lugubrious shots in the dark mark her specific visual tastes: the camera fixes on shadows beneath the pines, dark halls behind closed curtains, and views of the sea through windows, where we often remain in the unlit house. Cécile’s coming-of-age is rooted in this betweenness; she yearns for sun and pleasure yet lingers in the dark. When Raymond announces that Anne will be joining their vacation, Cécile asks, “Are you nervous?” Her father gawks at the suggestion, but Cécile, as she often does throughout the film, refuses to explain. We, like her father, are unsure exactly what she is thinking. Against Otto Preminger’s 1958 adaptation, full of sun and suggestion and Cécile’s voice-over narration of thoughts, Chew-Bose’s adaptation is an ode to the mercurial and impossible age of adolescence, the time when we desire to be seen yet remain unscrutinized.

Cécile’s inner world is one with which readers of Bonjour Tristesse will be deeply familiar. At the beginning of the novella, Sagan’s Cécile insists, “I should explain.” We are instantly caught in this tug-of-war between Cécile’s first-person narration and the figures attempting to parent her. Cécile assumes the reader will find her at fault for her summer behavior; she must begin in defense. Her narration is full of manipulation and cunning, even as she claims to be laying her soul bare. She still wants us to like her: “For, after all,” she muses, “what was our aim in life, if not to be attractive to others?” One of the philosophers that Cécile is supposed to study is Pascal, who places happiness above all else in man’s pursuit of meaning.

Happiness, for Sagan’s Cécile, is being attractive to others, and being attracted to others. Many of Cécile’s thoughts are dominated by her interest (and disinterest) in boys and men. “I much preferred my father’s friends, men of forty,” she narrates, “who […] treated me with the gentleness of a father or lover.” In the beginning, she is less concerned with young Cyril and his devotion to her; he is merely a plaything for summer. She yearns for adult independence and intrigue. By placing us in Cécile’s mind, Sagan introduces us to the trope of the teenage sophistiqué, the girl envisioning older male lovers that feed into her whims and fancies.

But Sagan’s Cécile, like Chew-Bose’s Cécile, is not invulnerable to love. After using Cyril to manipulate Anne, Sagan’s Cécile narrates, “I had never before experienced such an intense and overwhelming sense of helplessness.” In Chew-Bose’s adaptation, she takes this vulnerability one step further: Cyril, knowing Cécile and her heart, names the exact affliction that plagues Cécile, identifying it as guilt. As he sings to her in a song he composed, “Je m’appelle Cécile / Ma vie n’est pas facile” (“My name is Cécile / My life is not easy”).

Preminger’s adaptation propels a vision of Cécile the seductress. His Cécile (Jean Seberg) is a blonde hedonist, bent on self-preservation; her hair is cropped against her head, as if to suggest some sort of masculine aggression behind her sexual manipulations. His Elsa (Mylène Demongeot) is also blonde, a giggling bimbo, accused by Cécile of being “not too bright,” and his Raymond (David Niven) is the sort of father to speak about a woman’s “amazingly good figure” in front of his daughter. “I know women. I know how to make them like it,” brags Raymond. The father-daughter duo in the earlier film is full of sexual suggestion: Cécile and her father share frequent kisses on the nose, forehead, and mouth, and even Elsa, observing the duo, remarks that Raymond and his daughter have a “perfect marriage.” In many ways, Preminger’s family triangle aptly captures the dynamic of Sagan’s world. “[M]y father’s aversion to ugliness […] often led us to associate with stupid people,” Cécile explains in the novella. Indeed, the female playboy that Sagan envisions for Cécile to embody is the heart of Preminger’s film.

Chew-Bose, however, is refreshingly less interested in Cécile the heartless manipulator. Her dark-haired Cécile is neither the fiend of Sagan’s novella nor the seductress of Preminger’s adaptation. Rather, she is a conflicted teenager. She is paralyzed between her love for a certain way of life, one that includes the pleasures of adult independence, and her desire to be unconditionally loved, perhaps in a way that threatens that very independence. In a sense, Chew-Bose’s Cécile is caught between two versions of her character. She is divided between the vulnerable yet cunning Cécile of Sagan’s novella and the precocious and flirtatious Cécile of Preminger’s film.

Durga Chew-Bose is herself a writer, and in her 2017 essay collection Too Much and Not the Mood, she writes about movies. She details our obsession with clichés, with predictable shots and love plots and heartbreak, with jump scares and rising suspense and extended montages, all the things that we expect yet nevertheless become enthralled by. No matter how familiar we are with a film’s progression, she writes, we become obsessed with the story, and with it, our “unsophisticated idolatry.” She looks at movies whose “characters are so caught up and submerged, they may as well be living underwater where the glow is bleary—where sound gurgles and the world recedes.” Ultimately, Chew-Bose returns over and over to characters who are “caught up” yet predictable, set on a course charted by cinematic tropes even as they fight their fates, and these are the people who populate her adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse.

Stories are as predictable as people, and thus the devil-may-care attitudes of Raymond, Elsa, and Cécile—more like three friends, at times, than father-girlfriend-daughter—must be interrupted. Sevigny’s Anne wears kitten heels around the villa, follows a painstaking routine to make her bed, arranges a large vase of flowers in the dark foyer; she is domineeringly elegant. So too is she sharp, often seen wielding a knife. At one point, the camera focuses on her careful slicing of a pineapple with a surgeon’s precision, and in another scene, Elsa sits in a chair eating an apple while Anne perches in our foreground, using a knife to slice pieces away before delicately eating them. Anne is caught up in her own elegance, in self-assured womanhood. Chew-Bose sets Anne’s sharpness against Elsa’s softness. Elsa—who admits she doesn’t even know where to start with the question “Are you lost?”—is confident and warm and unashamed of her own ignorance.

Chew-Bose makes this adaptation her own by giving her female characters more depth; they are more contradictory, stronger but also more vulnerable. Cécile and Elsa’s relationship is the film’s crowning jewel. Thick as thieves, they care deeply for one another, and they understand each other. This new Elsa is not a giggling dud or careless paramour; she is the most sagacious character in their lot, piercing through Raymond’s and Anne’s and Cécile’s whims and lies with keen observations. In a shadowy patio scene at the beginning of the film, Elsa lounges on the stone wall while Raymond reclines in a chair, reading. He asks if she would like to be read to, and Elsa says no; those who are read to do not listen. “[E]verything is about listening,” she states. Elsa’s wit, at times, renders Raymond more childlike, exposing his immaturity; he fluctuates between a boy who must be corrected and a man overwhelmed by his desires. Before Anne’s arrival, Elsa astutely observes that Anne seems like the type of woman to fill a house with “uncomfortable chairs.” Later, while sitting together on the floor of Cécile’s bedroom, Elsa says, “You’ve got an energy around you. You are so alive to the smallest things.” Elsa’s praise stands in contrast to the constant stream of criticism from Anne, who insists that, just because Cécile is still in that adolescent stage of becoming, she is irredeemably “lost” and must be guided with a too-firm hand.

Chew-Bose joins a rank of directors who rescript young female characters in response to naive or superficial adaptations from the past. Greta Gerwig’s Amy March (Florence Pugh) is not left as a spoiled brat in Little Women (2019) but turned into a smart and resolute young woman. Cécile shares many qualities of Amy as a study in adaptation, beginning as unlikable, even cruel, before new female directors have given them new lives. And if Chew-Bose’s Cécile still retains some of the passive, pleasure-seeking qualities of Sagan’s Cécile, then Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre takes the idea of luxe materialism and passivity to a new level. Her female characters—from Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) to Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny)—are caught in an excess of materialistic hyperfemininity that verges on grotesque, coupled with a smothering passivity. Often, the contexts to which these directors’ characters are subject are either oppressive or luxurious.

Chew-Bose’s Cécile is an unpracticed manipulator, one who regrets her own wrongdoing and is frightened by her ability to lie. “I’m scared of what I’m thinking,” she confesses to Anne in one scene, but she will later smirk when Anne says, “You terrify me.” Cécile is frightened by her capacity for cruelty yet revels in knowing her own power. Indeed, she confesses to Cyril that she feels full of “poison.” Chew-Bose’s Cécile becomes most similar to Sagan’s through this fluctuation: the heart of the Cécile character is a young woman who cannot fathom what she herself is thinking.

There are times, Chew-Bose writes in her essay “Heart Museum,” when she thinks of “becoming a woman who screams or hacks off her hair.” Cécile is, if anything, a young woman who has entertained these very fantasies. In the final scenes of the film, Cécile has dyed her dark hair platinum blonde, in what is simultaneously an ode to Anne, a gesture of conceit, and, perhaps, a reference to Preminger’s earlier film. She has left Cyril and the summer behind, and she is ready to be grown up; sporting blonde hair—being like Anne—is how she can move forward. To put Cécile on-screen is to carry all the past iterations of this character: Cécile the seductress, the hedonist, the lazy student, and Cécile the depressive teen, the precocious young woman, and the cunning intellect. Above all, Chew-Bose’s Cécile is decidedly undecided, actively chasing adulthood but foiled by her own adolescent insecurity.

“It’s so pleasurable to be in close contact with a woman who seems totally at ease,” says Anne of Elsa. But watching Cécile, a young woman ill at ease, is pleasurable because it is so universal, so familiar. Cécile is a character who rails against her perception of naivete and heartlessness. In the end, we are indeed dependent on Sagan’s Cécile, no matter how much Chew-Bose has liberated us from her, to tell the story: we must let her explain.