Tag: French New Wave

Seduced by Bonjour Tristesse 

Otto Preminger’s classic ushered in a new wave of vibrant, Technicolour film-making

By John Patterson 

Renewed acquaintance with Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, after 30 years, compels me now to re-rank it above Anatomy of a Murder as the Austrian exile’s supreme masterpiece. Based on Francoise Sagan’s scandalous novel about an enfant terrible and her forbidden games on the sun-drenched French Riviera, it offers the most compelling performance the brittle and tragic Jean Seberg ever gave; and it showcases all of Preminger’s virtuosity with CinemaScope framing and three-strip Technicolor.

Seberg is Cecile, half jaded sophisticate and seasoned casino denizen, half teenage naif and plotter, the over-indulged daughter of meretricious playboy Raymond (David Niven). Their emotional intimacy borders on the incestuous: they have “the perfect marriage,” says Raymond’s blowzy mistress Elsa, a remark humming with possibilities. The arrival of Raymond’s new lover, Anne (Deborah Kerr), who clearly sees herself as a replacement for Cecile’s dead mother, stirs up an intense and tragic sexual jealousy on Cecile’s part. Where this will all lead we can only imagine, but from the film’s wintry black-&-white framing sequences, set half a year after that Technicolor summer, we know it can’t be good (look out for the first, shocking dissolve to colour – it burns).

Preminger’s artistry came into full flower with the arrival of widescreen and blazing colour in the early fifties. His metier was always mise-en-scene over cutting, and the wide frame allowed him to depict his stories and relationships spatially, rather than through coercive editing – there are few full close-ups in Bonjour Tristesse. The arrival of Anne pushes Cecile out of the central space she has occupied so happily with her father, and suddenly, doorways, curtains and other visual obstructions exile her to the margins of the frame, her place cruelly usurped. In terms of colour, this is the war of the reds and the blues, their complex interplay telling us much about the strength or weakness of characters in any given moment; watch for Cecile, hungover in a blue shirt, a fiery red ice-bag on her sore, angry, scheming head. It’s amplified in the Mediterranean landscape of eternal, immovable red coastal rocks and the ever mutable blue seas and skies.

The casting hews closely to the performers’ abilities and personalities: Niven rakish and inch-deep, Kerr prim and wide-eyed, burning with suppressed sexual hunger, and Seberg the scorned child-woman, still recognisably the Iowa high-schoolgirl she’d been a year earlier, but also now a movie star and new-minted faux-Parisienne sophisticate – her thespian shortcomings, hesitancy and natural Midwestern diffidence all become advantages here. She’s magnificent – and her short-cropped bob foretells Mia by Sassoon in Rosemary’s Baby a decade later.

America hated Bonjour Tristesse, but the French went crazy for it. It’s a key wellspring-movie of the French New Wave – it gave Godard his iconic Patricia for Breathless and a visual scheme for Contempt; Rivette was an aficionado, and Truffaut an almost rabid fan – he originally wanted Seberg for Day for Night.

As usual, the French were right.

 

Source (Aug 2013): Seduced by Bonjour Tristesse | Film | The Guardian

French new wave star Anna Karina dies aged 79 

Karina was best known for the string of films she made with Jean-Luc Godard, including A Woman Is a Woman and Pierrot le Fou

Danish-French actor Anna Karina, star of Bande à Part and Pierrot le Fou and collaborator with New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, has died of cancer at the age of 79, her agent said.

Karina, who epitomised 1960s chic with her elfin features and big kohl-rimmed blue eyes, starred in seven films made by her ex-husband Godard, including Alphaville.

“Anna died yesterday in a Paris hospital of the effects of cancer,” her agent Laurent Balandras told AFP, adding that she passed away in the company of her fourth husband, American director Dennis Berry.

“Today, French cinema has been orphaned. It has lost one of its legends,” culture minister Franck Riester tweeted.

Karina was still a teenager when she hitchhiked to Paris from her native Denmark to try to become an actress. She developed a successful modelling career before being spotted by Godard while walking along the Champs-Elysees. Godard offered her a nude scene in Breathless, his first film, but she refused.

They were a couple when, at barely 21, she won best actress at the Berlin film festival for his 1961 film A Woman is a Woman. They divorced in 1965. “We loved each other a lot,” Karina told AFP in an interview in Paris in March 2018. “But it was complicated to live with him,” she added.

“He was someone who could say to you, ‘I am going to get some cigarettes’ and come back three weeks later.”

She later went behind the camera to make Vivre Ensemble, a romance between a history teacher and a free spirited young woman that ends in drugs and domestic violence.

Karina also had some success as a singer, recording Sous Le Soleil Exactement with Serge Gainsbourg.

Source: French new wave star Anna Karina dies aged 79 | Film | The Guardian