Metacritic reviews

A work of image and mood, Bonjour Tristesse captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.

What Chew-Bose gets so right about these characters is their very performativity, building a lifestyle where everyone is legible to each other despite a desire to remain unknowable.

In short, there is much to enjoy in Bonjour Tristesse, but the film as a whole never quite rises to the level of its best parts. And that’s a little sad.

Chew-Bose’s filmmaking can be tasteful to something of a fault; the number of whispery conversations begins tipping the film over from gentle character piece to slight self-importance, a palpable self-consciousness of hyper-sensitivity.

Chew-Bose’s directorial debut is a sharp offering that adds to the mystique of the original material and makes a strong case for its own existence.

The film finds a state of grace in that torrential pull between the familiar and the new.

This immaculately lit and shot (by Maximilian Pittner) and gorgeously designed (by François-Renaud Labarthe, who did “Clouds of Sils Maria”) and costumed (Miyako Bellizzi) potboiler does justice to Sagan’s “ultimate beach novel” source, even if it never escapes that label.

Bonjour Tristesse works best as a sustained mood, as an evocation of long summer days that might not actually exist outside Eric Rohmer films and fashion magazine photo shoots.

Chew-Bose’s screenplay doesn’t explore the characters deeply enough to replace the book’s jaw-dropping quality with any psychological depth.

While promising, Chew-Bose’s attractive but ultimately hollow debut offers audiences a vicarious vacation to the south of France, in which vivid sense memories are accompanied by words far too eloquent to have sprung from a 19-year-old’s head.