Was Françoise Sagan the original brat?
I know, I know. Leaves are turning. Charli’s called it. It’s been fun, but it would seem we’re just about done with this nebulous wink of an aesthetic category. But before we shift wholeheartedly into Demure Autumn, I’d like to present one last candidate for admission to the brat pantheon.
The late French author and femme about town, Françoise Sagan.
Sagan was a teenager when she started writing her runaway hit, Bonjour Tristesse. A brazen, stylish confessional novel about a young woman plotting to break up her father’s relationship, this book is nothing if not brat. It’s compact, punchy, and frank about youthful desires. Naturally, several people in the French press called it “immoral” on publication.
And this isn’t to address the author herself. Paris Match called Sagan an “18-year old Colette.” And friends pegged her for much younger, on account of her confidence. (‘Cause I get what I want when I snap…) As a Catholic school rogue who loved parties and fast cars about as much as Proust and Stendhal, one can picture the lady holding court at Lucien…today?
(Though maybe we shouldn’t.)
As Elizabeth Winder described in Airmail,
Speeding down the Rue de Rivoli in her Jaguar, gambling away her advance in the casinos of Deauville, losing herself in the sensual rhythms of Left Bank nightlife, [Sagan] represented a new kind of woman, a gamine Beatnik who danced the cha-cha barefoot, took male and female lovers, and counted singer Juliette Gréco and film director Florence Malraux as friends.
I mean!?
Sagan went on to be a wildly prolific star in the French literary firmament. She wrote novels, non-fiction, plays, and short stories. She gave us one of the spikier Art of Fiction interviews. And her work was adapted for the screen.
Otto Preminger directed a version of Bonjour Tristesse in 1955. Starring the all-American gamine, Jean Seberg. Opinion stays split on whether the un-French cast adequately captured the novel’s drollness. But luckily, us Sagan fans are getting another shot.
This week at the Toronto International Film Festival, a new adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse premieres. And this remakes arrives with appropriately literary bona fides. The essayist and author Durga Chew-Bose is spearheading, making her directorial debut. And the cast includes the brattiest brat of them all, Chloë Sevigny.
Okay, I’m done now. Brat is dead, long live brat. But maybe make like Sagan this weekend, as we say goodbye to summer and salut to demure. Speed down a highway, break up a couple. Dance yourself clean.
