Bonjour Tristesse; Plein Soleil – review

In his final column for the Observer, our film critic welcomes the re-release of two influential classics from the late 1950s

What goes around comes around. Or "This is where we came in!", the words we'd whisper back in the days of continuous movie performances, before heading for the exit when we reached the point at which we'd entered the cinema. Appropriately in the week I write my final film column, two classic movies, Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Plein Soleil (aka Purple Noon, 1959), are re-released from that period at the end of the 1950s when I was embarking on a career as a professional writer. Both appear in beautiful new prints that do full justice to the Mediterranean sun which dictates their mood of dangerous eroticism, and both are closely associated with what was popularly known as the French Nouvelle Vague. In the first of them an English-speaking cast play French people; in the latter a French cast play Americans.

Based on the 1954 novella by the precocious 18-year-old Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse centres on Cécile (played by Jean Seberg, shortly to become a New Wave icon). A wilful, spoilt 17-year-old in a semi-incestuous relationship with her rich, philandering widowed father (David Niven), she schemes disastrously to prevent him marrying his sensible middle-aged fiancee (Deborah Kerr). The cinematographer is Georges Périnal, whose credits range from The Four Feathers to The Fallen Idol. The sequences in an existentialism-lite Paris milieu are shot in low-key monochrome; the flashbacks to the previous summer on the lotus-eating Côte d'Azur are in glowing colour.

Eric Rohmer, in Cahiers du Cinéma, called it "the most beautiful film ever shot in CinemaScope". François Truffaut, like all Cahiers critics an admirer of Otto Preminger for his objectivity and evenness of sympathies (as represented in the framing of his actors), lauded the movie for the auteur-director's handling of Seberg. He even went as far as to suggest that Sagan might have lifted the plot and central relationships from Preminger's Angel Face. As with all Preminger and Hitchcock movies of that time, Saul Bass designed the exquisitely evocative titles, a series of Picasso-esque images that play on middle-class Americans' expectations of postwar France.

Jean-Luc Godard chose Bonjour Tristesse as one of the best films of 1958, and later, in a celebrated 1962 special Nouvelle Vague edition of Cahiers, he said: "The character played by Jean Seberg in [Breathless] was a continuation of her role in Bonjour Tristesse. I could have taken the last shot of Preminger's film and started after dissolving to a title 'Three Years Later'." At that time Preminger wasn't regarded in the English-speaking world as more than an accomplished journeyman. But the critic-directors of Cahiers and their brilliant American exponent Andrew Sarris argued persuasively that he was so much more than the provocative gadfly that critics in London and New York took him to be. They saw Preminger's work as a coherently developing oeuvre.

Plein Soleil was the last great movie of René Clément, an established moviemaker whose work was being sneered at in the late 1950s by the Cahiers critics, Truffaut prominent among them, as le cinéma de papa. A great director, his artistic career was to decline in the 1960s, though for a while his polished international thrillers prospered. Plein Soleil is an early example of what was called noir en couleur. An amoral psychological thriller, it made the 24-year-old Alain Delon a star as the charismatic psychopath Tom Ripley. The anti-hero of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley, he suddenly murders his tormentor, the rich playboy Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), and takes over his identity, virtually turning into him. The innovative cinematographer Henri Decaë shot two films for Louis Malle before collaborating with Truffaut on his feature debut, Les Quatre cents coups.

This links Plein Soleil to the New Wave, as does Paul Gégauff, Clément's co-screenwriter, a frequent collaborator of Claude Chabrol. The film is a masterwork that made the beautiful, sexually ambivalent Delon a dashing, romantic, yet strangely withdrawn figure in movies by Visconti, Antonioni and Melville. His much-publicised activities in the French jetset and demi-monde added a dangerous edge to his cinematic reputation.

Plein Soleil led to a string of movies across Europe featuring Tom Ripley: Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders's The American Friend, Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, John Malkovich in Liliana Cavani's Ripley's Game. Delon remains the Ripley that comes first to mind, but no doubt there's a definitive Ripley to come.

As a lifeguard stalking the cinematic coastline this past half-century (beware of a nostalgist saying half a century rather than 50 years), I've observed film-makers surfing on nouvelles vagues on to our shores: the French, the Germans, the Czechs, the Australians, the New Zealanders have all had their new waves. Some were spontaneous (usually influenced from France), some government-sponsored. Every new country has aimed to create a national airline, and then a national cinema. I now feel it's time to descend from my Baywatch observation tower, check in my towel and surfboard and hand over the responsibilities for patrolling the beach to my young, experienced successor Mark Kermode and settle down inland.

Mark is a devotee of the thriving genre of horror flicks as I have been an assiduous proponent of the dying genre of westerns, and the job is in good hands. This chair is significant in a newspaper that has consistently taken film seriously from the moment the great cinéaste Ivor Montagu became the Observer's first movie critic.

I have on the whole had an easy pass through life. An important part of this has been due to working for a paper I've always loved and which has been for me, as Holmes says about Watson, "the one fixed point in a changing world". I'd like to thank its editors for their sympathy and its readers for their attention. As my longest-serving predecessor CA Lejeune (her watch extended from the coming of sound to the shock of Psycho) said in the title of her autobiography: "Thank You For Having Me".

Contributor

Philip French

The GuardianTramp

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