In this luscious haunter directed by Otto Preminger, the surfaces glitter like a perfect dream. It feels like you could step into this lovely, ultra-blue French Riviera summer and instantly relax with everyone else. The sighing tides from the Mediterranean are your visual and aural backdrop. The days are sunny, the air is clean, and even the people are friendly, with the exception of some surly servants. For the price of whatever it costs you to see this movie, any old ditch-digger can now hang with the idle rich in one of their favorite vacation spots. It’s a Technicolor CinemaScope taste o’ heaven.
And it also might be one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen.
To the film’s vast credit, it’s not a maudlin sort of sadness, nor is it sentimental. This is not a tearjerker. Preminger never once plays us with a cheap emotional trick. Rather, the darkness of the film is more a noir-like pall of doom. People are stuck in cycles and patterns. When they wind up in bad places, they do it via a trap of their own making.
Lonely playboy David Niven (48, at the time) and his spoiled 17-year-old daughter Jean Seberg are curious soulmates. They exchange witty banter like Nick and Nora Charles. They drink too much together. They live lazily together with no judgement. When Seberg fails in school and counts on finding a husband to support her, it’s fine with Niven. While he plows through a series of mistresses, his daughter is the constant in his life. He needs her. They love each other and it doesn’t feel like they’re doing anything wrong (Niven and Seberg are both total charmers). Most of the first half of this film is an overload of smiles and jokes and pleasant vibes, so much so that you wonder where exactly all of this is going to take a turn.
The turn comes with the arrival of Deborah Kerr, fashion designer, conservative soul and old family friend who’s long had a certain sexual tension happening between her and Niven. In her late 30s, Kerr’s about fifteen years older than the ladies with whom Niven typically carouses (represented here by 23-year-old blonde beauty Mylene Demongeot, who delivers a gem of a comedic performance), but he goes after her, not caring that his young mistress is nearby and staying at his beach house.
Niven never stops to explain himself to us and we don’t need him to do that because the film does a beautiful job of implying that he knows that there’s no future in the way he’s living and Kerr provides his best shot at finally achieving grace.
He proposes, she says yes. That should be great news, but it also means the end of Niven and Seberg’s unique father-daughter bond. Kerr now wants to impose some not-unreasonable discipline on Seberg, something that the little rich girl has never had to deal with her in entire life. Seberg’s reaction is a childish tantrum and then a wacky, Disney-like, Parent Trap-style scheme to end this engagement.
It’s no spoiler to say that this all blows up in her face because the very first scene in the film is a “present day” sequence set in a smokey black-and-white Paris (the Technicolor French Riviera scenes are an extended flashback), in which Seberg is a troubled society girl who picks up and discards men like cigarettes and narrates her life from behind a glaze of stunned sadness. She’s another William Holden, floating dead in the swimming pool at the beginning of Sunset Blvd., only still breathing and about half-alive. That film was the story of one person’s ruin and so is this one. It comes off as harmless for awhile, but it’s got a left hook that will knock you on your ass.
I got such a first-class high from this film that I watched it twice in one night and I can report that it plays even better the second time. Those murky Paris scenes make sense and acquire new weight. The foreshadowing lands like a jackhammer. Illusions drop like a curtain. The cracks in the perfect life show and you wonder why any of these people ever believed in it in the first place.
Then you think about it a little more and realize that it’s all that they have ever known.
It’s taken from Francoise Sagan’s novel, which was published when she was 18. I haven’t read the book, but this is very much a “teenage girl’s point of view” film. One of the best. Jean Seberg’s Cecile is funny, impulsive, mysterious and magnetic. She also doesn’t fully understand life yet and is not always right. That’s where 53-year-old tyrant director Preminger steps in to tell us about the sort of pain that can slowly kill you for a lifetime.
In 1958, this got mixed reviews and sank in theaters, but some of the French New Wavers were way into it. Jean Luc-Godard went so far as to say that Seberg’s role in Breathless is unofficially the same character from this film three years later. Francois Truffaut also wrote gushing praise of her performance and tried to cast her in at least two of his seminal works, but neither panned out, despite Seberg mostly working in France for the rest of her career. She’d eventually die of an apparent suicide in Paris in 1979 at age 40.
Everything about this film is sad (the French title literally translates to “Hello, Sadness” in English). Saul Bass’s memorable opening titles sequence, based largely on images of falling tears, is simple, brutal and sinks an arrow right into the heart of the matter.