Summer Postcards: Bonjour Tristesse

Muriel faces up to the melancholy that comes to us all towards the end of summer, and find a Gallic expression of it in the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, a huge bestseller and succès de scandale set on the French Riviera. The book launched the career of its teenage author Françoise Sagan – herself an iconic forerunner of the rebellious French youthquake of the 1960s. Is the story – a timeless Greek-style tragedy charting the catastrophic consequences of deregulated insouciance – immoral or was Sagan actually a moralist? And then there is the book's 1958 Hollywood film adaptation by Otto Preminger starring Jean Seberg. which, with its mix of Technicolor and black-and-white, brings to life a dark story set in the sunniest, most colourful place.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.