Cecile spends carefree holidays in the sophisticated circles of the French Riviera with her widowed father Raymond, an aging Don Juan. The two share a companionable friendship that tolerates each other's freedom. The idyll is completed by the father's young girlfriend, the demimonde Elsa. The atmosphere is sensual throughout. However, the carefree daily routine of swimming in the sea, evenings at nearby beach cafés, and the carefree relationship Cécile soon begins with law student Cyril is dramatically shaken when fashion designer Anne Larsen, a friend of her late mother, shows up at the seaside house. Torn between admiration and revulsion, Cecile fears that with Anne's intrusion into her "family" she will have to abandon the carefree lifestyle she and her father have led until now. When her father leaves Elsa to marry Anne, Cécile hatches a plan - with tragic consequences.
The novel Bonjour tristesse, written by Françoise Sagan in a matter of weeks when she was 18, quickly became a bestseller, translated into dozens of languages, sold millions of copies, won numerous awards, and was made into a film in 1958. It made its author famous overnight, but also earned her the harshest criticism for its alleged immorality: The time was beginning to be ripe for a girl who freely controls her body for her own pure pleasure, even in relation to the opposite sex, and who lives out her sexuality without worry or guilt, but her contemporaries were not yet.
Francoise Sagan varies her basic melancholy themes of loneliness, weariness of life, and boredom in her best-selling novels. Her protagonists are mostly materially privileged people who prefer to indulge in the comforts of a luxurious life in fashionable places. Resigned, they experience the fleeting nature of love and the temporary nature of all happiness. Sagan's nihilistic approach has been evaluated as an expression of an existentialist worldview.
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