I love how Chloe Sevigny butters toast

On Bonjour Tristesse + an interview with the film's director Durga Chew-Bose

Next week is my birthday, which I will kick off as usual with a matinee. Rarely are there compelling new movies in early May, but this year it’s different. Today sees the release of three excellent films—Pavements, Vulcanizadora, Bonjour Tristesse—each pulling in wildly different directions.

In today’s newsletter: I only have space to go deep on one, Durga Chew-Bose’s stunning directorial debut that I have been raving about since September. HThis one’s long stream of consciousness, and I was also so honored to talk to her about the film, her favorite food scenes, and more for moviepudding.

For something shorter: I wrote about some frivolities for the ladies of

Creamline

. Their movie issue is full of great picks and a wonderful way to get to know them.

For a pick me up: The matcha-iest matcha gelato at Sorate in SoHo tastes as if someone took the idea of matcha and froze it into dessert. Aggressively not-sweet and preferable to one at the shiny, new 12 Matcha, whose gelato remains slightly sandy and will necessitate waiting on line.

“I can't wait to have old friends.”

BONJOUR TRISTESSE is now available to rent on demand on your preferred site.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a movie. Again. It happens time to time, if you watch enough movies, if you have a soft heart. But not as often as you would think. When I was younger, a film would play a vigorous fiddle with my entire heart, raising its temperature until I melted, burning with a recognition I thought was only mine. What is adolescence if not learning your most intense feelings while deeply your own, are also everyone else’s.

Would Bonjour Tristesse have done it for me then? I don't think I was ever exactly like Cécile (Lily McInerney, cooly contemplative, endlessly watchable, in an auspicious debut), a feral kitten, who thinks she’s more grown up than she already is. But a premature sense of adulthood has almost certainly led me gravely insensitive mistakes and a corrosion of a former-self, of that I’m certain. Her desires are a mystery to herself, unwittingly atomic as it turns out, and as only only a young girl’s can be.

Based on Françoise Sagan’s novel from 1954, Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation softens the egocentrism of Cécile in the book. She’s on vacation with her father (Claes Bang, cautiously caddish) and his girlfriend Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), their tight-knit dynamic set against the languid, sunglutted backdrop of the French Riviera. The trio’s fragile equilibrium is disrupted with the arrival of Anne (Chloe Sevigny), the sophisticated fashion designer and close friend of Cécile’s late mother. It’s not so much the father-daughter bond that faces strain, but rather the entire construct of her world—her carefree summer—that begins to fray under Anne’s immaculately tailored and chiffoned shadow.