Intoxicating ocean views and a flood of sunshine in a seaside villa welcome the audience in Durga Chew-Bose's directorial debut, "Bonjour Tristesse." The beauty creates a too-good-to-be-true environment — the perfect setting for summer romance, youthful exploration and, somehow, something dark and unnerving.

“Bonjour Tristesse” will premiere September 5 at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, where Chew-Bose will also receive the TIFF Emerging Talent Award from Amazon MGM Studios at the TIFF Gala on September 8.

Inspired by the controversial 1954 novel of the same name by Françoise Sagan, who was only 18 when she wrote the film, the film follows a young Cécile (Lily McInerny) and her widower father Raymond (Claes Bang) as they spend the summer in the south of France with his newest partner, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). A seemingly perfect vacation is disrupted when Anne (Chloë Sevigny), an old friend of Cécile's parents, arrives for a visit.

Chew-Bose's portrayal is only slightly transformed for modern audiences, a conscious decision made by Babe Nation Films' Katie Bird Nolan and Lindsay Tapscott, executive producers on the project. When Chew-Bose was first approached by Nolan and Tapscott to direct the film, initially only as a writer, the trio agreed that the women of "Bonjour Tristesse" were "pretty modern already."