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Jim's Real Detroit Column Betty Blue

When I first saw French director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s brilliant and stylish thriller Diva (1982), I was totally blown away. The film is still hipper than most of its copycats in subsequent years, has non-stop lush cinematography of a neon-filled Paris, ably mixes romance with its chilling twists, and is filled with gimmicks that seem very natural in their surroundings. The film can only be described as dazzling. Beineix’s next, 1983's Moon in the Gutter (La Dune dans le Caniveau), still delivered the style, but with its slightly too-gorgeous lighting and exaggerated camera moves, felt like out-and-out masturbation. Even worse, it was confusing as hell.

A few years later Beineix’s third feature was released. I had relived the thrill of Diva several times on video and was ready to forgive Moon in the Gutter. Not knowing much about Betty Blue (32B2 le Matin), I headed to the theatre feeling that any Beineix film had to be seen on the big screen. When the lights went down and the film began, people began to literally squirm in their seats. As the Mona Lisa gazed down from above the headboard, the camera ever so slowly dollied in upon two extremely naked people going at it hot and heavy in the bed. You have to remember that this was 1986, and most people were not yet taking their mates to watch the hard-core sex of Romance (1999) at the neighborhood theatre. This sex wasn’t explicit or particularly shocking--but it was extremely erotic, even for a European film. Of course it didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t there with a first date or my mom.

The narrator’s voice came on: “I had known Betty for a week. We had made love every night. The forecast was the storms.” The couple in bed are Betty Blue (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade). Betty is passionate, prone to tantrums, and despite her appetite for sex, very childlike. Zorg is a handyman/would-be writer whose completed novel is found by Betty, who takes it upon herself to market the manuscript. It becomes obvious early on that Betty is highly unstable, and the remainder of the film focuses on her breakdown and the damage that her uncontrollable temper inflicts. When a swinging publisher rejects Zorg’s novel, Betty lets him have it. Even Zorg is not spared her wrath (at one point she throws all Zorg’s possessions out the window), although as the story progresses, she turns more towards self mutilation.

Betty Blue is quite draining to watch (more so in the 178-minute director’s cut) even before the grim twist at the end. Throughout, as the couple struggles with Betty’s insanity, Jean-Francois Robin’s cinematography is consistently , Beineix’s direction is (as expected) stylistic over-the-top, and the nudity level is higher than most softcore porn films. One of Beineix’s messages seems to be that, in a relationship, although great sex is...great, you can’t stay in bed forever.

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