I kind of feel like I should dislike 1986's Betty Blue more than I do. It's about two attractive young people who are basically just assholes, committing theft and vandalism with impunity between sessions of passionate sex. The movie ends in a fairly cheap, overwrought pathos. And yet, I found the three hour film beautiful and compulsively watchable.
I was going to watch half last night and half to-night but I couldn't sleep and realised I wanted to finish it. There's very little plot to the film. It begins with a long sustained shot of its two main characters, Betty (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), having sex in Zorg's cluttered beach shack. The sex scenes throughout the film are explicit and supposedly a relationship developed in real life between the stars but I'm pretty sure the sex is simulated--the performers are never sweaty or flushed.
Zorg is comfortable in his easy life, his job being merely upkeep of the other nearby shacks for a sleazy but fairly laid back landlord. Betty won't accept a comfortable status quo, though. In addition to violently expressing disgust for the landlord, she vandalises the property, eventually setting fire to Zorg's shack. Meanwhile, she has dogged faith that she can get his notebooks filled with stories published.
As Zorg explains to different people throughout the film, most of the time Betty's a wonderful and charming companion but, every now and then, she has these episodes of drastic psychological aberration. At the beginning of the film's last act, he finds her with her hair cut short and her face smeared with lipstick, a scene that probably would have been more effective if actress Beatrice Dalle had actually cut her hair. As it is, the wig she wears is rather obvious and looks much bulkier than her real hair, making it look as though she'd gained hair suddenly rather than was shorn of any.
I didn't find most of the film's comedy to be funny at all. When Zorg and Betty are working at a restaurant, a customer asks Zorg to replace a pizza she ordered because it has ham instead of the anchovies she wanted. So Zorg takes it to the kitchen and pulls rotten food out of the garbage, puts it on the pizza, and sprinkles cheese over it. We then watch the customer rapturously devouring the pizza. This is clearly meant to be funny but I think only a real sadist would find the humour in it. There are several moments like that in the film where I think we're meant to side with Betty and Zorg because they're young and beautiful.
Dalle is really hot and she's always captivating. It sounds like she's not much different from Betty in real life, too, having been caught shoplifting multiple times. She even once, on very brief acquaintance, married a rapist she met when visiting a prison. Dalle later described the marriage as a disaster though it apparently lasted at least a few years following his release. In any case, it seems like she'd be a stressful acquaintance.
Betty Blue is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1822
To dwell in rotting gaols they rate a perk.
The dizzy, walking fungal men were weak.
So nothing less than zombie crowds'll work.
The ratings tanked in time for sleepy week.
A reigning liar sinks in rancid cheese.
Decisive hate belittles gentle thoughts.
With gestures weak, the paper puppets please.
A rotten sun is seen with fuzzy spots.
A glowing deer was hostile, rushing guests.
The sabre teeth obliged the host with kills.
Their frocks were ranked among the very best.
A dying troupe conveyed their final wills.
Beside the ship's a fish of equal size.
A passion's buried deep behind its eyes.
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