Montreal-based writer and director Durga Chew-Bose in her home on Aug. 19.Evan Buhler/The Globe and Mail
There is a lovely, uneasy scene in the new Canadian co-production Bonjour Tristesse, which world premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this week: During a drowsy summer holiday in a French Riviera villa, a father, Raymond (Claes Bang, Bad Sisters), plays solitaire with his teenage daughter, Cecile (Lily McInerny). That might not sound dramatic, but like every scene in this deceptively languorous film – the screenwriting and directing debut of Montrealer Durga Chew-Bose – it’s about what’s simmering underneath. About who’s invited into whose inner life, who’s not, how subtly that changes, and the devastation it wreaks.
You won’t find that card game in the eponymous source novel, a sensation in 1954 when its author, Françoise Sagan, was only 18. And you won’t find it in the 1958 film adaptation directed by Otto Preminger, which starred David Niven and Jean Seberg as Raymond and Cecile. It was Chew-Bose’s idea, and it encapsulates everything she set out to accomplish: a sense of timelessness, where everyday details don’t interrupt the plot – they are the plot.
“I’m the last person to ask what a movie is ‘about,’ ” Chew-Bose says in an interview in August. “I tend to zero in on a scene that will detonate. I have great admiration for filmmakers who are stubborn in their pursuit of small moments. It takes a lot of vision to keep them in a film. And stretching time, staying with stillness – I’ve always found that really seductive.”
She cites as inspirations Kelly Reichardt, Lucrecia Martel, Olivier Assayas, François Ozon and especially Mike Leigh, with whom she’ll share a stage at TIFF on Sunday, as he receives the Ebert Director Award, and she acquires the Emerging Talent Award. “Mike Leigh conditioned me as a filmgoer,” she says. “He tells the stories of average people’s lives, their gardening plots, their jobs, their desks, their family dramas. He forces me to pay attention in a way that feels … holy.”
Chew-Bose, who studied literature at Sarah Lawrence College in New York – “Specificity was prioritized, voice and style were championed,” she says – began her career as a border-hopping journalist, writing for Canadian, U.S. and British publications, including The Globe and Mail, GQ and The Guardian, plus a book of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood. Eight years ago, the Canadian producers Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott – whose company, Babe Nation (White Lie; Alice, Darling), had acquired the rights to Bonjour Tristesse – invited her to adapt it because they felt she had the chops to update it.
She was reluctant at first. “It wasn’t a book that meant the world to me, it wasn’t a coup de coeur,” Chew-Bose says. “But I realized I could enter it from a place that was a little dispassionate. That gave me room to continue the story, as opposed to retelling it.”
After reading her draft, the trio decided Chew-Bose should direct it, too. “I was eight months pregnant,” she says, laughing. “I mention that because everything always happens at once. My script was unorthodox. There were camera movements in it, directions like ‘Hold on her hands.’ I knew who the costume designer should be, I had casting ideas, I had palettes.”
Chew-Bose’s version hews to the novel’s through-line: Cecile, 17, is discovering her sexuality, its power over herself and others; Raymond, a widowed rogue, is in a relationship with Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), who is younger and artistic. After Raymond detonates their idyll by instigating an affair with Anne (Chloë Sevigny), his late wife’s best friend, Cecile contrives to drive Anne away.
But Chew-Bose is more generous to the women. “They were a little simpler on the page. I saw that as an opportunity to really listen to them, what they were saying by not saying anything,” she says. (Taking care of women spilled into the shoot itself: Child care for Chew-Bose’s toddler was part of the budget.)
Durga Chew-Bose's debut feature film, Bonjour Tristesse, will premiere in the Discovery program at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where she will also receive the Emerging Talent Award.Elevation Pictures
And she doubles down on mood, those moments where laziness turns to itchiness. You can feel that the air is too still, the wind too hot. There are lingering shots of black coffee and oranges, of toast being buttered, a pineapple being cut. Cecile untangles earbud cords in real time.
“My director of photography, Maximilian Pittner, and I talked about this a lot: how to suggest a still life without complete stillness,” Chew-Bose says. “Where you hold on an image, but a breeze moves the curtain, or you hear a distant train. We shoot seashells on a windowsill, but you see Cecile passing in the background. So there’s always a little mystery or intrigue.”
Directing felt natural to Chew-Bose, even though she cops to being the least experienced person on set – and that includes McInerny, whom she used to babysit in New York. From Sevigny, Chew-Bose learned “there’s always a little bit more work to do, and you have to go for it. Never be satisfied. She’d see a flower arrangement and suggest something a bit different for her character. It was always a delight to edit her scenes. We’d pore over them, trying to find those little things she does that might be imperceptible, and let them shine.”
After years in New York, Chew-Bose recently moved back to Montreal, to be closer to family. But her debut film is so international (a Canada/Germany co-pro with French service producing) – which is emblematic of the way so many Canadian films are made now – I have to ask: Does Chew-Bose call herself a Canadian filmmaker?
“I don’t think in those terms, so to say it seems new,” she replies. “But I am. I was born in Canada; my producers and editor are Canadian. Lesley Barber, who’s Canadian, did our music – her score for Manchester by the Sea is synonymous for me with great moviemaking. I truly feel that my being able to make movies would have only happened here.”
Currently, she’s on deadline for two magazine pieces, and is finishing two screenplays, which she hopes to direct: one, a story of four interconnected women, based on an event that happened while she was scouting villas for Bonjour Tristesse; and the other, an exercise in plot.
“It’s a single location, three actors,” she says. “Giving myself limitations and forcing myself to write in a way that doesn’t come naturally to me has been exhilarating.”
Chew-Bose is soft-spoken, thoughtful, but it’s clear that her artistic ambitions are lofty. “I don’t think I’m allowed to say I’m not ambitious,” she sums up. “I do think big. I think it’s important to dream. Dreaming is what fuels imagination for me, what keeps my channels open. It has to feel impossible.”
Bonjour Tristesse will have its world premiere at TIFF Sept. 5 at 9 p.m., Royal Alexandra Theatre, with an additional screening Sept. 6, 4 p.m., Scotiabank (tiff.net).