Patron Pick – Betty Blue

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Betty Blue (1986)
Written and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix

Certain movies don’t take long to reveal that they were written by a man who has difficulty seeing women as anything other than to make a man feel good about himself. Betty Blue is such a movie, rife with all the cliches of French cinema. That doesn’t make it a disposable, awful film. It comes across as more comical with how severe and melodramatic it sometimes takes itself. The film is also a great example of a very particular subgenre of cinema called Cinéma du look. The term was coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in 1989 and has been applied to the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax. It’s style over substance, spectacle over narrative. It’s slick commercial aesthetics with a focus on the alienated in society. It’s also very male-gaze-y.

Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is an aspiring writer who has become a handyman for a community of beach houses on France’s Mediterranean Coast. He meets nineteen-year-old Betty (Béatrice Dalle), and she begins living with him almost right away after one night of passion. They have a very volatile relationship, and after one instance of Betty tearing up the apartment, she discovers Zorg’s unpublished writings. She believes the man is a genius and above his handyman’s work. She burns their apartment down, forcing them to move in with her friend in Paris, who owns a hotel. Betty is determined to get her boyfriend’s work published, but her quick temper serves to create numerous problems & obstacles along the way.

Some of the closest relations to Cinéma du Look would be Francis Ford Coppola’s early 1980s films One From the Heart and Rumble Fish. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s melodramas are also some chief inspiration, particularly his depiction of doomed romances and dysfunctional couples. This is to say, films in the Look are highly expressionistic. They don’t take place in grounded worlds but ones with bold colors and larger-than-life characters. If we’re following the metaphor of familial relations in film, we can see the offshoots of The Look in the work of surrealists like Jean Pierre Jeunet or, even more recently, Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The film reflects the interior life of its protagonists in a very French way…and no, do not ask me to define that further. If you know, you know.

Betty Blue feels like a foreign film that might be someone’s first foray outside American pictures. Its debut at Cannes gave it quite a bit of buzz, particularly surrounding the amount of nudity and sex in the film. The movie’s opening shot is a realistic simulated sex scene between the leads. It keeps going throughout to the point of what I consider unintentional absurdity. It also doesn’t hurt that the extremely intense Béatrice Dalle plays the titular character. If it had been some generic supermodel French actress cast in the role, I don’t think this picture would be as memorable as it is. Dalle captures Betty’s edge quite well, so there are points where you are a little scared of how unpredictably violent she can get.

The gratuitous nudity wears thin after a while, especially as you grow & mature in your appreciation of art. I hope most of you have grown in that way since you were young. In my first viewing as an adult, I see that this relationship is so wildly out of balance. Everything Betty does is in service to Zorg. Zorg just hangs out and sometimes worries about Betty. It’s not until the last twenty minutes or so that he really shows genuine signs of caring about her, and even then, the focus is on his pain and suffering. She’s catatonic at that point. He can’t bear to see her like that. 

What the film does is fetishize bipolar disorder. I think that’s a pretty accurate diagnosis of Betty, though she’s not written wholly realistically, so I have to extrapolate how this French pervert would misunderstand BPD. It’s pretty clear with her sexual manias, bouts of depression, and the whole volatile up & down played out in fast forward. Only through Dalle’s choices in her performance can the character of Betty transcend the meager bits she’s given in the script. Dalle’s looks, reactions, and body language help fill out Betty’s dimensions. It also serves to underline Zorg’s casual dismissiveness of her pain. You want to shout at the screen for him to help her at many points. 

Beyond the complicated sexual politics of the film, Betty Blue is a gorgeous movie to watch. The film was released in 1986 but looks a decade ahead. There’s a mix of commercial aesthetics and music video composition from the era. It makes for a picture that is visually engaging but wears thin quickly. The director knows this, so every 30 minutes, give or take, Betty Blue shifts to a new setting & situation for the characters. There’s the beach community, Paris, a pizzeria, a deceased woman’s old home, a piano store, and a hospital. At one point, there is an utterly ridiculous bank robbery that feels like it comes out of nowhere.

There is little substance here. I recommend watching this for Dalle’s performance, but other filmmakers of The Look are far more interesting and complicated in their storytelling. The most vital thing Betty Blue has going for it is its cinematography and an aesthetic that feels like a bridge between its own time and the direction of cinema in the future. A studio like A24 owes quite a bit to these flashy yet shallow movies in introducing film enthusiasts to such expressionism. The film can’t get past its extremely limited perspective, though, which ultimately hinders it.