Bonjour Tristesse is Chloë Sevigny and Lily McInerny’s tale of lustful revenge

Chloë Sevigny and Lily McInerny see each other almost every day. Not to meet up, exactly – rather, they’re neighbours who live on New York’s Lower East Side, which often means being coincidentally privy to intimate moments in each other’s lives.

​“I once saw Lily on Prince Street with one of her friends crying her eyes out,” says Chloë. ​“Us New Yorkers, we live our lives on the street. We’re just open books out there. She was on a date the other day…”

​“That was a meeting!” Lily adds quickly. ​“Although after a while…”

​“She sees me picking up my kid from school,” Chloë continues. ​“We’re very into it.”

The two actors made this happy, neighbourly discovery after starring in director Durga Chew-Bose’s debut feature, Bonjour Tristesse – an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s acclaimed 1954 novel of the same name, which she wrote at 18. Adapted into a film by Otto Preminger in 1958, it was no small feat for Chew-Bose to once again reinvent such a beloved work of fiction, but she did so with a sure hand that both revered the source material and introduced a fresh complexity to the narrative.

In Bonjour Tristesse (2025), Lily plays 17 year old Cécile with precocious naïveté. She lives a blissful life: her dad Raymond (an excellent Claes Bang, who you might recognise as The Prick from Bad Sisters) is a bit of a player, but the pair have a very close relationship – so close, in fact, that they play Solitaire together. They holiday in the south of France – the film was shot in Cassis, near Marseille – and Raymond’s young girlfriend, Elsa, gets on well with Cécile, who has freshly embarked on a holiday romance of her own. Things are pretty good.

All of this is swiftly disrupted by the arrival of Anne, a good friend of Cécile’s late mother. She’s played by Chloë, who successfully makes a play for Raymond. Stern, elegant, and poised, these are qualities that entice Cécile as much as they enrage her, in a strange push-and-pull which soon turns the French Riviera into a playful, menacing terrain animated by lust and revenge. Oof! We could go on. We’ll let Lily and Chloë give you the low-down instead.

Congratulations on Bonjour Tristesse. What were your initial thoughts when you read the script?

C: Initially, I had reservations, because I didn’t want to kind of propel this whole, ​“older woman scorned, losing her love to younger woman”. That felt maybe like something that I didn’t want to be a part of. But then I kept seeing it happening around me. I’m like, why avoid the cold, hard facts? This just happens. And then speaking with Durga at length and seeing how she wanted to examine these relationships between these women [changed things]. I was very attracted to the storyline between the father and daughter. That was something you don’t see very often. Durga is very considered. She’s very bright; She just had a gentleness and a soulfulness to her that I knew would translate to the screen.

L: I also was really attracted to just the idea of working with Durga. I wasn’t familiar with the novel prior to working on the film. It’s now become one of my all-time favourites. I knew Durga’s work as a writer, I saw she’d been transitioning into screenwriting – I told my agent, whatever she does, I want to be a part of it. Like I would be a tree in her school play. Then I became familiar with Cécile and the world of Françoise Sagan and the [1958] Otto Preminger version, which I didn’t watch until after we’d finished filming.

The film is deeply atmospheric and languorous, almost ASMR-adjacent. What was it like to shoot?

C: Amazing. I mean to be in Cassis; the crew was very French, it was a very relaxed atmosphere. There was a sensitivity there and a reverence for the material. What a dream to be in that location and get to live there for a couple of months, having wine after work, going to the beach together on the weekend. My kids were there; Durga’s kids were there. It was a family affair. The only thing we bumped up against, which nobody seemed to notice when they were location scouting, was all the boats…

L: Those boats!

C: There was a lot of noise on the water. That was the only pesky part.

L: It’s a very popular tourist destination, for obvious reasons, which is famous for the Calanques – which are these rocky inlet beaches you can only access by boat. That route was directly outside our villa, so there was a constant battle between the engines and us.

Beauty is of great concern for both Anne and Cécile, albeit in different ways. Why do you think that is?

C: For Anne, at least, her commitment to her art is all encompassing. It envelops her whole lifestyle and her whole being. As an aesthetic person myself, I can understand that, but I can also understand being bogged down by it. I think the movie examines that. It’s all Anne has.

L: So much of your definition and expression of self or identity as a woman is done through style, which is very closely linked to beauty. Anne’s character being this style icon, this beacon of femininity, is hugely important for Cécile. She’s been raised by Raymond, the playboy single father who’s very motivated by pleasure. They live this kind of hedonistic lifestyle and are guided by whatever feels good – beauty, the aesthetic pleasures of life, but not necessarily in a refined way. And then Anne enters their lives, which is when Cécile’s way of being becomes more intentional.

What do you make of the tension between the two women?

L: I think there is a resistance to change from Cécile as a young woman. She’s on the precipice of a lot of change, and Anne becomes a scapegoat for her frustration. There is also a deep attraction to Anne that makes Cécile scared and insecure – because this person could go away, as so many of the women in Raymond’s life do. There’s a push and pull, an attraction and repulsion that she starts to develop. It was a really exciting dynamic to explore.

What was it like working with Durga?

C: She was interested in hearing everything we had to say, but she also had very distinct ideas about what she wanted to say and how she wanted to say it. I felt very protective of her. She was in a fragile place in her life – she was away from her child quite often, we were all kind of coming out of Covid, she’d just lost her father. She is a great artist, and I was inspired by her strength in leading us as a group in spite of all these challenges.

Claes is brilliant in the film, too. Tell me more about working with him.

L: He and I got to start working together a couple of weeks prior to shooting the film, to establish that [father-daughter] rapport which is so important to the foundation of the film. It was invaluable, establishing that playfulness and secret language, this unspoken communication. Durga used this reference of cowboys sitting around a campfire as a metaphor for our dynamic, which was a really guiding vignette.

Did you get the same time to rehearse with Lily, Chloë?

C: No, because my character just shows up out of nowhere, so it felt authentic not to. For Claes, I think it was an interesting turn for him to play a romantic lead because he’s so used to playing these sinister characters, which I think he might’ve been a little frustrated with. So it was like, let Lily have the pathos for once! Let’s find something else for the elders to do. So that was fun to play with, because neither of us had really ever done a classic romance.

L: You guys look so gorgeous together.

C: He’s a handsome man, it’s undeniable.

Bonjour Tristesse, is a visceral representation of summertime and all that encapsulates. What’s one thing you’re looking forward to doing this summer?

L: Reading a book outside. Doing anything outside, to be honest.

C: Going to Cape Cod and committing to sitting on the beach from morning until night.

L: I can’t wait for a good summer thunderstorm. That was one of the highlights from our shoot – sitting in the terrace in the middle of a torrential downpour, watching the lightning while drinking wine on the clock. It was just wonderful.