BONJOUR, AGAIN

 

After the Afternoon with Durga Chew-Bose’s "Bonjour Tristesse" 

There is a particular shade of blue that only exists in memory. You know it: the one that clings to tiled pools, childhood dusk, and cigarette smoke curling through an open window. Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse swims entirely in that blue. 

It is not a remake of the 1958 film, nor a faithful adaptation of Sagan's book; it is something more elliptical, more dangerous. A murmured echo rather than a reply. Here, the camera doesn’t follow bodies so much as it hovers, like withheld affection. Sunlight isn't incidental; it's predatory. Every frame feels hand-touched, as if someone has been living in it quietly for weeks, folding linens, watching you sleep. 

 The photography is liquid and unhurried. There’s a patience to how the light sculpts faces, not in flattery, but in exposure. Chew-Bose’s camera is both conspirator and witness. It doesn’t intrude. It waits. Especially on the character of Cécile, not the coquettish teen we’ve been taught to expect, but a girl carved from sea-glass and dry wit, with a voice that folds cruelty into charm the way silk folds into shadow. 

 

It’s hard to tell if anything happens, exactly. A dinner party disintegrates. A glance burns too long. Someone swims alone. Yet it accumulates: a sense of moral erosion, of sun-drunk complicity. 

The soundtrack is more mood than melody, Satie-like, half-breath, as if composed in the pause between longing and memory. At times, I couldn't tell if the sound was from the film or from my own apartment: the hum of a fridge, a train sighing somewhere else. 

Watching it, I thought: this isn’t cinema. It’s a weather system. It doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be remembered. There’s one scene, Cécile smoking in a sun lounger, unread book on her lap, lashes heavy with heat. She looks like someone who once wanted everything, then learned to want less, but better. That image stayed with me all evening. I thought of all the versions of youth I’ve worn like linen shirts: light, wrinkled, slightly false. I thought of how loneliness ripens in summer. And when it ended, I didn’t feel closure. I felt watched. As if the film had decided something about me, and chosen not to say it aloud.