Whether Brat Summer has ended or not, the Brat girls are continuing to stay booked and busy. For Chloë Sevigny, she will soon be starring in Ryan Murphy’s ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’ and she also just celebrated the premiere of Durga Chew-Bose’s ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The latter is an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 coming-of-age novel, showcasing the complexities of relationships among women and how they can come to wield influence over one another’s fates. Sevigny tells us that the film is “very different” from the book.
“The book is very eternal,” she told IndieWire on the red carpet for the “Bonjour Tristesse” TIFF premiere. “So most of that Lily [McInerny] is having to play. It’s her responsibility, not mine. She’s playing the stakes [laughs]. But I think we capture the essence of the book and the essence of of a young girl kind of coming-of-age and being frustrated with where she is in her life and wanting certain things. I mean, hopefully fans of the novel will find something in our film that they loved about the book.”
McInerny, who was nominated for Best Breakthrough Performance at the 38th Independent Spirit Awards in 2022 for her turn in Sundance hit “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” adored working alongside Sevigny. “Chloë has been such a huge role model for me for as long as I can remember,” she told IndieWire. “I was certainly a little starstruck at first. There was a little bit of a hump I had to get over, but as soon as the cameras started rolling and we entered our first scene in character, I immediately locked in. She’s so focused and committed and masterful in what she does that it was very easy to sort of melt into that imaginary world.”
Earlier this year, Charli XCX assembled an array of current it-girls, from the likes of Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, Chloe Cherry, and more, to star in her music video for ‘360.’ The Internet nearly lost its mind when Sevigny was revealed to have a surprise cameo with less than half a minute left in the video.
“We have a mutual friend who actually DM’d me,” Sevigny said of how the pop star got her on board for the video. “[They were] like ‘Charli’s doing this video’ and then they sent me the song and the treatment and I showed up and they’re like, ‘Just act really bratty.’ And it was like before we knew that the whole thing was going to be a Brat thing. [They were] like, ‘Act bratty and just attitude [laughs].’ I was like, ‘Okay, I can do attitude.’”
In Kate Erbland’s review for the film, she writes that “Chew-Bose’s power lies in her patience, as her script isn’t at all afraid to lull her audience into a state of not quite boredom, but at least ennui (the French! again!) before oh-so-gently steering us into a much more shocking, and ultimately satisfying space. While much of the film seems to be filtered through the haze of memory (and, later, regret), the emotions at its heart slowly click into place over the course of the film. The lessons, too.”
