Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 44: Monday Feb 13

Bonjour Tristesse (Preminger, 1958): Sanctum Soho Hotel, 20 Warwick Street, London, W1B, 7pm

This is a Society Film Club @Sanctum Soho screening and you can find out more about the people behind the club here. You can find about tonight's screening at their Facebook page here.

This is not the best-known Otto Preminger movie by some way but certainly deserves re-evaluation. Here's a review by Fred Camper on the Chicago Reader website which hails the movie a masterpiece.

Chicago Reader review:

'Jean-Luc Godard conceived Jean Seberg's character in Breathless as an extension of her role in this 1958 Otto Preminger film: the restless teenage daughter of a bored, decaying playboy (David Niven), she tries to undermine what might be her father's last chance for happiness, a romance with an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr). Arguably, this is Preminger's masterpiece: working with a soapy script by Arthur Laurents (by way of Francoise Sagan's novel), Preminger turns the melodrama into a meditation on motives and their ultimate unknowability. Long takes and balanced 'Scope compositions are used to bind the characters together; Preminger uses the wide screen not to expand the spectacle, but to narrow and intensify the drama. With Mylene Demongeot, Geoffrey Horne, and Juliette Greco; photographed in Technicolor (apart from a black-and-white prologue and epilogue), mainly on the Riviera, by Georges Perinal.' Dave Kehr


Here is an extract.

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