Durga Chew-Bose on TIFF Debut ‘Bonjour Tristesse’

Intoxicating ocean views and cascading sunshine at a seaside villa welcome audiences into Durga Chew-Bose‘s feature directorial debut, “Bonjour Tristesse.” The beauty creates a too-good-to-be-true environment — the perfect setting for summer romance, youthful exploration and, also, somehow, something dark and unnerving.

“Bonjour Tristesse” premieres Sept. 5 at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where Chew-Bose is also receiving the TIFF Emerging Talent Award presented by Amazon MGM Studios honor at the Sept. 8 TIFF Gala.

Adapted from the controversial 1954 novel of the same name by Françoise Sagan, who was just 18 when she penned it, the film follows a young Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her widowed father Raymond (Claes Bang) spending the summer in the south of France along with his latest partner, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). A seemingly perfect holiday is disrupted when Anne ( Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Cécile’s parents, comes to visit.

Chew-Bose’s rendition is only mildly transformed for modern audiences, an intentional decision as well as Babe Nation Films’ Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott, executive producers on the project. When Chew-Bose was first approached by Nolan and Tapscott to adapt the film, initially as just the writer, the trio agreed that the women of “Bonjour Tristesse” “were quite modern” already.

“My first step towards adapting it was trying to find how could I be additive to this. There’s a few women in the original book that spoke to me and I fell in love with them for different reasons,” the “Too Much and Not the Mood” author and co-founder of Writers of Color says. “From a strictly writing vantage point, that was pretty seductive to me to feel moved by these three women — Cécile, Elsa, and Anne — in separate ways.”

The Montreal-born director adds she’s had an ample amount of time to map her vision out, and potentially overcome any first-time director jitters, as it took Nolan and Tapscott three years just to secure rights to the novel, and nearly eight years overall to make.

Chew-Bose expresses gratitude for having both enchanting original characters to work with and stellar actors to breathe life into her versions of them. One particular scene captures the chemistry they find with one another, when all three women eat breakfast together. Barely a word is spoken. Instead, we discover more about them through the smallest of gestures, such as how one eats fruit or chooses where to sit.

“That might have been one of my favorite days on set,” Chew-Bose shares. “We wanted to shoot it like a play… We were just sitting in seats watching these women in the morning. I loved that day on set because there’s something about letting your actors play and keeping the camera still, which was exciting for me as a director.”

Chew-Bose also gives thanks to her crew for trusting her vision.

“We shot for 30 days in Cassis [France], a little bit in Marseille. It takes a lot of faith in a crew. I’m coming from Montreal. I’m not French. This is a beloved French book. I’ve never stepped on a set,” Chew-Bose says. “It takes a lot of people and a lot of artists and a lot of different ways of working to make a movie that has cohesion and to end up in post-production and feel like we had attained a level of cohesion, to me, I’m really proud of that.”