“He used me like a Kleenex and then threw me away.” That was how Jean Seberg described director Otto Preminger’s treatment of her after she starred in two of his movies.

The first of those films was St. Joan, in 1957, for which she won the title role in a nationwide casting call beating out 18,000 contenders, 3,000 of whom were given auditions. She was 17 at the time, a naive from Marshalltown, Iowa. The movie, about Joan of Arc, was the biggest flop of the director’s career. Seberg talked about being burnt at the stake twice, the second time by the scathing critics.

Not daunted at all, Preminger announced that Seberg would also star in his following movie, Bonjour Tristesse, based on the Françoise Sagan novella that created a storm of controversy when it was published in 1955. Preminger had bought the rights to the 18-year-old’s debut novel, the one that remains her best-known work despite a long writing career.

We can see, in the Margaret Herrick Library’s Digital Collections, how firmly the Production Code Administration rejected the summary of the novel submitted for approval of Tristesse. A memo by Morris V. Murphy said it was “totally unacceptable under the provisions of the Production Code, because of gross illicit sex without compensating moral values.” Presumably, the sorrow and guilt exhibited by the character of Cecile in Preminger’s revised version got the PCA to change its mind and approve the film.

The story is told from Cecile’s point of view. Seberg plays the role of a rich young girl who shares her playboy father’s hedonistic lifestyle of parties and vacations. When Cecile, Raymond (the father, played by David Niven) and his young mistress, Elsa (played by actress Mylène Demongeot), spend the summer in a villa in the south of France, Cecile falls in love with a young neighbor (Geoffrey Horne).

Their idyll is cut short when a friend of Cecile’s late mother, Anne (Golden Globe winner Deborah Kerr), comes to visit. Out of the blue, Raymond proposes to her. Elsa is simply cast aside. Cecile bitterly resents Anne for taking over her father’s life, for nagging her about her studies, and for stopping her from seeing her neighbor-boyfriend. That’s when Cecile comes up with a malicious plot to separate the new couple, with disastrous consequences. The weak father falls headlong into the trap and is equally culpable, but that aspect is given short shrift.

The film defies conventional genres, dealing with tragedy, irresponsibility, selfishness, and even suggesting incest. In short, many moments of trauma and sin in the most glamorous of settings.

The story opens and closes in Paris, with all of those scenes shown in stark black and white. The French Riviera scenes in the middle of the film are shot in cinemascope and technicolor. Preminger chose to film this way to reflect the mood of his young protagonist, with a devastating ending that finds Cecile looking at herself in a mirror in her Paris apartment.

Otto Preminger was another director who ‘cut’ his films in the camera, often using long takes and two shots, very likely to preempt studio interference in editing. Despite the expense of filming in Technicolor, he did not exceed the $1.5 million budget. Of particular note are the opening titles of the film by Saul Bass, a frequent collaborator. Blue petals fall like teardrops. One of them stays on the end title, poised under one eye of a line drawing of a face, an image that is reproduced on the promotional poster. Kerr is first-billed, followed by Niven and Seberg.

 

Juliette Greco sings the haunting title song in a Paris nightclub in the film’s first act. There are cutaways to Cecile’s face seen over the shoulder of her dancing partner as the mournful lyrics seem to resonate deeply with her. Her expression cues the audience that all is not right in her world.

 

“I live with melancholy

My friend is vague distress

I wake up every morning

And say, “Bonjour tristesse”

The street I walk is sadness

My house has no address

The letters that I write me

Begin “Bonjour tristesse”

Though it was said that the director behaved like a gentleman off set, Preminger was a monster as a director. He harangued and berated the younger cast members. Seberg got the brunt of his volatile temper. Horne told a reporter, “Otto went berserk; he seemed to get pleasure in going nuts, and it was not an act. I never saw him be affectionate with Jean. He was not really a father figure for her, and though there were rumors, which I did not believe, he certainly was not her lover either.”

In “Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story”, by David Richards, Kerr is quoted as saying “I formed a very deep respect for the quiet strength with which she put up with all the extravagant publicity that had been forced on her by her discovery and the lashing she took from the critics. This strength was also apparent in her coping with Otto, who as a friend and social companion is a charming and witty person, but who turns into a demon when directing. At least he did on Bonjour Tristesse as far as Jean was concerned. I think any other woman would have collapsed in tears or just walked out. But she calmly took all the berating and achieved a very interesting and true Sagan-type heroine.”

Bonjour Tristesse did not do well in the US. Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times said “Almost everything about this picture, which opened at the Capitol yesterday, manifests bad taste, poor judgment and plain deficiency of skill. If Mr. Preminger thought to hide its smallness or disguise its bad taste thereby, he has goofed on the concoction. “Bonjour Tristesse” is a bomb.”

The French critics loved it. François Truffaut, who wrote film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema at the time, was most complimentary about Seberg’s performance. “When Jean Seberg is on the screen, which is all the time, you can’t look at anything else. Her every movement is graceful, each glance is precise. The shape of her head, her silhouette, her walk, everything is perfect; this kind of sex appeal hasn’t been seen on the screen. Seberg, short blonde air on a pharaoh’s skull, wide-open eyes with a glint of boyish malice, carries the entire weight of this film on her tiny shoulders. It is Otto Preminger’s love poem to her.”

More admiration would come from the francophone world. Jean-Luc Godard gave Seberg her most memorable role in his 1959 debut film, Breathless, opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. He said that “The character played by Jean Seberg 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.’”

Seberg stayed on in France after Bonjour Tristesse, for most of her life. Her first two husbands were French. Truffaut never did work with her. She was dead by age 40, by suicide, after being hounded by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI because of her support of the Black Panther Party.

Niven would win the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Actor for Separate Tables (again with Kerr) in 1958, the same year Tristesse was released. He is the only actor to win while hosting the Oscars.

Kerr, who was at the peak of her stardom when Tristesse was released, would continue her successful career in the movies and, later, on stage.

Bonjour Tristesse was restored with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in partnership with The Film Foundation.