From the monotone, monochrome opening of "Bonjour Tristesse" we immediately learn that Cecile is a young woman ill at ease in the world. In spite of her wealthy, apparently carefree lifestyle, where the champagne flows freely and the male admirers are equally as rich and effervescent - nothing is able to touch Cecile's heart. She is, as the black and white imagery suggests, locked in a world of sadness, surrounded by her "wall of memories". The film then shifts into technicolour, as Cecile (Jean Seberg)recounts how, only a year earlier, as a
seventeen year old, her life was happy and filled with possibility. We follow the story of how she and her father (a thoroughly rogueish David Niven) have been, in one summer on the South of France, abruptly confronted by the consequences of their casualness towards the feelings of other human beings, and how they have both come to pay the ultimate price for their selfish "live now pay later" mastercard philosophy of the heart.
Stylishly filmed, "Bonjour Tristesse" is a movie which will haunt you. Not merely because of the poignancy of lost innocence which Jean Seberg's performance depicts so well, but because it places its fingers on the wound all of us carry with us - the moment, when we cannot quite say, exactly when childhood slipped away.