Daddies Girl

The Otto Preminger Centennial

Based on the best selling book by teenage author's Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse is the story of 17 year old Cecile (played by the ill-fated actress Jean Seberg), and her scheme to keep her ladys man widower father (David Niven) from marring her late mothers best friend (Deborah Kerr). This film was pretty different from anything else I've seen Preminger do, and most likely chosen simply as a vehicle to prove the worth of his discovery Jean Seberg, whose previous film Joan of Arc had failed at the box office. Seberg makes the film, and is totally beguiling and believable in a multi-dimensional portrait of a spoiled young women of wealth, who adores her father. I'm going to spoil the ending here because I have to say I don't buy the Deborah Kerr character as a suicide, I think that resolution bespeaks the author as having been a teen, yet the rest of the story worked for me with the lead characters overall voice seeming very true. A unique offering.

Actress Jean Seberg was found dead in her car of a drug overdose in 1979.