This stylish film is one of Otto Preminger's best. The French New Wave has influenced him in his opening shots, but only on a visual level. This is pure Hollywood on ever other level. The melding of the two styles works perfectly and begins by setting the stark mood in stunning black and white widescreen shots of 1958 Paris. The present is painted in shades of grey and silver, where Cecile portrayed by the beautiful Jean Seaberg moves aimlessly thought her pointless upper crust Parisian life. Only when she encounters her father David Niven later in the evening does the past seep in on the edges of the cinemascope frame in vivid color and finally takes over moving us from the present to last summer on the Riviera. The device is used several times as we move from past to present and finally at the end of the film it creates a stunning effect once you know what suddenly happed to Cecile and her father last summer. The thing that changed everything forever and allows Preminger's camera to linger in the last frame of the film on Jean Seaberg as she wipes away the make-up from her perfect face. David Niven is perfectly cast as Raymond the aging (...) father of Cecile. He has the cool style and humor of a man who can't commit to any woman and treats his daughter like a playmate rather than his child. His particular talents as an actor are that he seems to be playing the "David Niven" character in most of his films but here in 'Bonjour' as he often does in so many roles he makes a nice little twist on the "character". He catches you off guard to wrench his and the audiences emotions and prove once again what a good actor he is. At first Deborah Kerr also seems to be playing her role by rote but it is just a ruse to set us up for her fall. As does Niven she too digs deeper in to her persona as Anne Larson and carries the film to its surprise ending. She is a joy to watch as a film actress and here she is particularly wonderful. The French actress Mylene Demongeout is delightful as Elsa, Ramon's summer plaything. She is in fact 'Brilliant!" in the role. Geoffrey Horne is decorative and serviceable in his role as Cecile's beau who awakens her (...) . Jean Seaberg who with her short cropped spiked hair in certain shots reminded me of Sharon Stone has that kind of blonde goddess look that Miss Stone possesses. She was only 19 when she made the film and in the hands of her director she presents us with a sensitive and spellbinding performance as Cecile. She is at once a teenager in turmoil and a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman. This is a delicate high wire act that the young Miss Seaberg executes with charm and elegance. She is festinating to watch and just right for the role. The subject matter is even today a little shocking and indeed this is one of the films of the 1950's that put the sin in Cinemascope. Despite the restrictions of the day or because of them filmmakers of that time were challenged in ways they are not today. Challenged to be inventive and insinuate things that we were too innocent or too naive to know happen in the world. Those filmmakers knew that the imagination is more vivid and titillating than what they might show. It was good that the antiquated production code of the Hayes office crumbled in the 60's but with it's passing we lost a whole vocabulary in film. Here is a wonderful example of the meeting of the Movies and 50's cinematic innuendo that serves this delicate story to a tee. I think "Bonjour Tristesse" is 'Brilliant!'
Hello, Gorgeous!
BONJOUR TRISTESSE, like many Preminger films, is ripe for reevaluation, and this spiffy new DVD transfer may help spur on that long-overdue second look. Seberg's performance was much-maligned in its day, but she looks smashing here and acts with considerable wit and poise; our girl's a long way from Marshalltown. True, vocally she's perhaps not ideal, but certainly sounds as Gallic as co-stars Kerr and Niven. The material plays with all three stars' images in fascinating ways; Seberg's ingenue is lethal, Kerr, frequently neurotic, was never presented as a creature of such moral ambiguity, and Niven's all suave facade covering inner corruption, in a performance akin to his Oscar-winning turn in SEPARATE TABLES. Wonderful location photography, and great fun to hear the title tune keep turning up in a variety of arrangements, in best 50's-movie-theme-song tradition. The comparison others have made on this site to the glorious Sirk melodramas is apt; the picture transcends genre in many of the same ways. Preminger and company manage to get under your skin.
An Impressive Film in all Aspects! Why?
This film has several elements that are worth noting. First, it is an accurate account of the empty, amoral, flamboyant and insensitive life in the French "high-life" during the late 50's/early 60's. Told in flashback, the story shows the way the central characters behave, have fun, hurt people and get to a point when "have fun" is just a way of forgetting.
The whole cast is excelent. David Niven is the most perfect "late life" bachelor who is cool about everything. Jean Seberg is absolutely beautiful as a teenager who practically lives as a woman... the chemistry of the two characters (father and daughter) is fantastic (and very puzzling). Deborah Kerr has also a great role as a sophisticated woman who doesn't get to understand the games going on between father and daughter.
The film has a beautiful cinematography. It opens in a dark black and white while all the flashback scenes are in the most fantastic colors - a perfect example how cinematography serves to enhance the character's point of view and (also) tell the story at a visual level.
The final scene is something that will stay in your memory for a long time as a great example of a great conclusion for a story that is rich and well written.
This film is a serious study of aloofness, emptyness and amorality in a way that only Hollywood could tell. It shows that money can buy off some consciences while, deep inside, some consiences cannot be bought.
A trully great cinematic experience!!! This DVD edition has no extras (except for trailers). The image quality is first rate. So is sound quality. The opening titles (by Saul Bass, no less!) is gorgeous! The cinemascope cinematography by Georges Perinal begs to be viewd in a big screen. The music score by the great Georges Auric ("Rififi" and "La Bele et la Bête") is top.
This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $15.98YOU SAVE $4!
Buy it
With this magnificent Criterion DVD release, Luchino Visconti's 1963 historical drama The Leopard will finally earn widespread recognition as one of the most beautiful epics ever produced. In adapting the popular novel by Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa (an Italian equivalent to Gone with the Wind, set during the tumultuous Garibaldi revolution of 1860-62), Visconti was initially reluctant to cast Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Prince of Salina--the aging aristocrat "leopard" of the title--who accepts change as inevitable during the struggle for a unified Italy. But Lancaster (even with his voice dubbed in the fully restored Italian release) delivered one of his finest performances, modeled after Visconti himself, and reacting to political and familial upheavals with the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Burt Lancaster DVD Release Date: Released the 08 June 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $49.95 Your Price: $39.96YOU SAVE $9.99!
Buy it
The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $11.98YOU SAVE $3!
Buy it
Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like Mahler, too). Even if it tends to hit the nail on the head a little too forcefully, and even if Visconti can test one's patience with lingering looks at crowds at the beach and hotel dining rooms,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dirk Bogarde Director(s): Luchino Visconti DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.98 Your Price: $17.98YOU SAVE $2!
Buy it
Julie Christie's miracle year of 1965 (she was also in Doctor Zhivago) was capped by a best-actress Oscar® for this sardonic take on Swinging London. Looking about as gorgeous as women get, Christie ascends the ladder of social success, trampling everybody in her path--an ascent that allows writer Frederic Raphael and director John Schlesinger to slash away at the morally bankrupt world that would enable such a person to triumph. Cynics might suggest that Schlesinger's approach, rife with the experiments of New Wave filmmaking, is nearly as empty and showy as the world it describes... which may be why this movie seems more dated than, say, Richard Lester's films from the '60s. Still, with Christie getting generous and suave support from two of the top British stars of the day,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dirk Bogarde - Julie Christie Director(s): John Schlesinger DVD Release Date: Released the 02 December 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.95 Your Price: $13.46YOU SAVE $1.49!
Buy it
