Durga Chew-Bose’s first film moves Françoise Sagan’s summer to the present day and slows it to a drift. It is a pleasure to sit in, and Chloë Sevigny is quietly excellent, but the jealousy that drives the story never properly arrives.
Durga Chew-Bose’s first film as director takes Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel, a book written by a teenager and about one, and moves it to the present day, keeping the villa, the sea and the family and losing little of the plot. What it adds is time. This is an unhurried film, 111 minutes of terrace lunches, swims and long looks, and for a good hour that is a pleasure. What it does not manage is the meanness at the centre of the story. Cécile is supposed to be jealous enough to break something, and here she mostly seems mildly put out.
The setup is Sagan’s. Cécile (Lily McInerny) is spending the summer at a house above the water with her father Raymond (Claes Bang), a widower who treats his whole life as a holiday, and Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), his current girlfriend, who is young and cheerful and knows she is temporary. There is a boy with a boat, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider). Then Anne (Chloë Sevigny) arrives, an old friend of Cécile’s dead mother, and the house rearranges itself around her.
Sevigny is the reason to watch. She plays Anne with small, exact gestures, saying less than everyone else, correcting Cécile’s posture and reading matter without raising her voice, and lets us see, once or twice, how tired she is of being the sensible one in every room. It is a performance about self-control, and it costs her something. We felt more for her than the film seems to expect us to. When she smiles at Raymond across a table we understood the appeal of the arrangement better than Cécile ever does.
Maximilian Pittner shoots in warm daylight and stays close: skin, wet hair, cut fruit, the pattern of a dress against a chair. Whole scenes are built out of these details, and the film is at its best when it trusts them. François-Renaud Labarthe’s villa is pale stone, shutters and old furniture, a house someone’s grandparents bought, lit only by what comes through the windows. Miyako Bellizzi puts Anne in dark, structured clothes among people in crumpled linen and swimsuits, so she looks like a visitor from a tidier film, which is the point. Lesley Barber’s score is piano and strings, used sparingly. Amélie Labrèche keeps the shots long and lets people finish looking at each other before she cuts.
The trouble is Cécile. McInerny is watchful and likeable and never dangerous. Sagan’s girl is clever, spoilt and frightened of losing the only life she knows, and the plot needs that fear to turn sour. Chew-Bose’s script gives her observations rather than wants; she notices things beautifully and then goes for a swim. Bang plays Raymond as charm without weight, which is right for the man but leaves a gap where the pull between him and Anne should be. We never believed he would change for her, and so we never believed Cécile had anything to fear. Harzoune, as Elsa, is warmer and sharper than the role usually gets, and the film is livelier whenever she is on the terrace.
Here is what we felt. We were content for a long time, in the way one is content on the second day of a holiday, and somewhere around the seventy-minute mark we noticed that contentment was all we felt. The second half takes a turn we will not describe. When it came it arrived quietly, and we were sorry, and we were not shaken, and we think Sagan meant us to be shaken.
Otto Preminger filmed the book in 1958 with Jean Seberg, and whatever that version got wrong, it understood that this is a story about a girl doing something unforgivable and knowing it. Chew-Bose has made a film about a girl watching, and watching is what she directs best. As a first feature it is confident about light, rooms, clothes and faces, and shy of cruelty.
Watch it on a warm afternoon with the windows open. It asks little of you, gives an hour of real pleasure and a fine, sad Sevigny, and stops short of the sting in its title.
