Bonjour tristesse

Melodrama is a long lost art, relegated to the far corners of unadvertised TV movies. It is not that we have gotten more sophisticated and smart, though we very much like to think so. The reason is rather that we have gotten more and more childish and alienated from the pleasure of our emotions. We want so much to understand; yet we cannot accept anything slightly out of the familiar. We consequently mistake confusion for depth, packaging for content. Melodrama is the aesthetics of emotion; it strides to evoke a certain emotion. It indulges and luxuriates in the emotion. At its heart, it is empty; and its vision, shallow. The best melodramas do not pretend to be otherwise, that is not the point. A story as convoluted as the plot of Douglas Sirks’ “Imitation of Life” and all the social issues mentioned, it is focused in doing one thing only—to arrive at the long and gorgeous funeral so we can experience the maximum amount of sadness and pity. It is tragedy in its purist, Aristotelian in nature. All the social injustice and struggle of life serves a collective experience of emotions. The journey to this end must be beautiful as it is an aesthetic experience. Beautiful is the anaesthetic that carries us through the long journey. And nothing is more beautiful than Otto Preminger’s “Bonjour tristesse.” A beautifully restored print was shown at the VIFF. The beauty of the film is blinding and the beauty of Jean Seberg is almost impossible. And its critics are correct: it is shallow and even juvenile. But then it is a film based on a novel by a rich teenage girl about a rich teenage girl’s “tristesse,” how could it be not shallow? It is far better than a shallow thirty years old pretending to have depth. And it is certainly better than seeing a seventeen-year old experiencing life like a sixty-year old. Moment by moment through the film we come to, not so much understand but, experience the “tristesse” born out of that very shallowness of her life. It is not profound by any stretch of imagination, but how beautiful it is, and how triste.