(2025) Written and Directed by Durga Chew-Bose, who adapts the Françoise Sagan novel | 110 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | At Carbon Arc Cinema 

(1958) Directed by Otto Preminger | Written by Arthur Laurents, adapting the novel by Françoise Sagan | 94 min | ▲▲▲ | VOD

Preparing for this new adaptation of the famed novel written by Françoise Sagan when she was a teenager, I went back to the 1958 Preminger version. (The source material remains unread by me. )

It’s an odd one to visit decades later. Critically adored, it’s a morality tale from the perspective of a wealthy, idle French teenager Cécile (Jean Seberg), who has a seemingly incestuous relationship with her widower father, Raymond (David Niven) — she calls him by his first name while hugging and kissing him a little too often. Told in flashback from wintry Paris, which appears in bleak black-and-white, Cecile remembers the beautiful, tragic summer before on the Riviera in explosive Technicolor.

Back then, Raymond was enjoying the company of another idle young woman, Elsa (Mylène Demongeot), when a somewhat more mature lady from his past arrives, fashion designer Anne (Deborah Kerr) — Raymond promptly casts Elsa aside for the stylish Anne. Cécile is also displaced in Raymond’s affections and resents Anne’s influence, hatching a cunning plot to split them up.

What has aged poorly here is the film’s judgment of Cécile — though not so much her privileged, frivolous lifestyle, which we get to relish, attending parties and clubs and lounging in the sun. The suggestion that she should’ve been much less willful and minded her elders is a lot, even as all she had was her father’s flagrant example. The compassion she earns is largely due to Seberg’s brilliant work bringing the character to life — she allows for a touch of lightness in the morality tale, but there’s no doubt of the filmmakers’ intent.

What ends up feeling hopelessly dated is the film’s vision of a blissful “modern” hedonism and a stagey dramatic structure that butts up against its themes. That said,  it’s still very much worth seeing for the performances and the shocking schism in its two-tone cinematography, if not the unintentional lolz.

It’s also a delicious pleasure to compare the current film to the earlier. Bonjour Tristesse (2025) is Quebec filmmaker Chew-Bose’s first feature, but she clearly has a confidence in the tone and style she wants to establish and what of Preminger’s version she wants to toss out — which is most of it — while also nodding to its presence.

She immediately divests with the subtext of incest, the explicit class commentary — no mysterious, interchangeable sister-maids in this one — and the parallel narrative set in Paris. A coda suggests an urban social milieu, but it’s brief.

Instead we have a desaturated, but beautifully composed and intimate Riviera locale, the house near the beach spare and modern, with every shot from cinematographer Maximilian Pittner gorgeously framed — whether close ups of the tanned skin and hooded eyes of the actors, or their languid limbs draped over chairs, cigarettes shared between them, posed against the dark geometry of the sets. This is a film to live and luxuriate in, dark days on the Côte d’Azur.

This Cécile (Lily McInerny) is more of an introvert, happy to observe the adults in the room and less likely to share her own feelings. Like her father, Raymond (the excellent Claes Bang), she’s a brunette, as is Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), who is a great deal less naive in this present-day vision, while Anne (Chloë Sevigny) is a much more complex, layered character than her predecessor. She’s less surprised by Raymond’s philandering, more patient, more knowing, and more prone to using her fashion choices to reflect her inner life. Her connection to Raymond’s dead wife, Cécile’s mother, is more explicit and that creates a deeper, troubled history between these three.

That said, when Anne and Raymond do hook up, it feels much more sudden and surprising than it should — the subplot could’ve been a lot more deftly seeded. This while Cécile’s boyfriend, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), maybe the only genuine innocent here, makes his presence felt.

With the obviousness of the earlier work stripped away, this version’s been accused of shallowness. On the contrary: Perhaps Cécile is shallow, but the film? With its restrained, deliberate vibe, its conscious, creative visuals and thematic undercurrents of ennui — much more akin to the classic concerns of French New Wave cinema —  I’d argue all of this makes it entirely worthwhile spending time in, swaddled in a hypnotic, soothing soundtrack, with Z Berg’s “When I’m Gone” the beautiful centrepiece.

The one, specific moment from the Preminger film Chew-Bose chooses to remount is powerful and undeniable, the best thing to save: She turns Sevigny into a pillar of salt on screen, just as Preminger did with Deborah Kerr, 67 years ago.