On vacation with her father on the French Riviera, an 18 -year -old girl fears that the arrival of the friend of her deceased mother disturbs her future.
Posted yesterday at 11:30 a.m.
Launched at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hello sadness marks the beginnings of the author DURGA CHEW-BOSE (the collection of tests Too Much and Not the Mood) to the realization. From the outset, the Montrealer of Indian origin shows an innate meaning of the image and the style. Shot in Cassis, very close to Marseille, this contemporary adaptation to the timeless charm of the learning novel by Françoise Sagan, published in 1954, also bears in it the reminiscences of the adaptation of Otto Preminger of 1958.
Dressed in a yellow jersey similar to that of Jean Seberg at Preminger, endowed with the Mutine grace of Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina From Billy Wilder, La Gracile Lily Mcinerny embodies Cécile with freshness, a young girl in love with freedom. If the film is camped today, the costumes of Miyako Bellizzi (the miniseries Scenes from a Marriagefrom Levi Hagai) confer on Hello sadness The elegance of the 1950s. The pure lines of Bellizzi are perfectly located in Chloë Sevigny, which brings surprising vulnerability to the Rigid Anne Larsen.
Friend of Cécile’s deceased mother, Anne comes to disturb the quiet days that the girl flows with her father Raymond (Claes Bang, with a more devastating than refined charm) and the new conquest of the latter, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune, both solar and dark). From then on, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider, who gratifies the film of his talents as an actor and singer), love of Cécile vacation, and her mother (Nathalie Richard, luminous) will be the lucid witnesses of the waltz of desires and feelings that is played in the opulent villa.
While it appeared cruel in the novel of Sagan and the very faithful adaptation of the American director of Austro-Hungarian origin, the Cécile de Durga Chewbose displays a clever mixture of cynicism, sweetness and innocence. Deprived of the narration of the story, and by the very fact of the sagacious spirit of Sagan, it turns out to be evanescent.
In the absence of a voice, the filmmaker expresses Cécile’s melancholy through her point of view. Thus she embraces the magnificent landscapes of the Côte d’Azur, where the characters are framed as in paintings by Colville, and crunches snapshots of her daily life into a suite of still lifes evoking Cézanne in the Instagram era.
-Recalling Rohmer’s films by its apparent lightness, its marivaudes exchanged on the beach and its languid rhythm, Hello sadness is an aesthetic adaptation which evacuates certain complexities of the novel. On the other hand, there is intact the carelessness so dear to Sagan.
Drama
Hello sadness
Durga Chew-Bose
Lily McInerny, Chloë Sevigny, Aliocha Schneider, Claes Bang
1 h 50
7/10
