Betty Blue. (18)
Directed Jean-Jacques Beineix.
Starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Beatrix Dalle, Gerard Damon, Consuelo De Haviland, Clementine Celarie and Jacques Mathou. French with subtitles. Blu-ray and DVD. Theatrical cut 121 mins, Director’s cut 185 mins.
This two disc release of Betty Blue offers the choice of the original two hour version or the three hour director’s cut. Curiosity demanded I went with the latter. What could a three hour version of Betty Blue be like? Well, very much like three hours of Betty Blue.
When Betty and Zorg leave their beachside shack at the end of the first act, some 45 minutes in to the film, I had hopes that this longer cut really would add a sweeping, epic dimension to Beineix’s tale of doomed love and lift it to a higher level. Some two hours later though it was clear that ultimately all it adds is another hour.
The film charts a romance that lasts around a year but the structure encompasses a life time. The early beachside scenes are youth and infatuation; the middle Paris section are the working years, the career years while the final section in a village in the Pyrenees is retirement and death. Sadly the film follows the scheme too closely – that early section is sumptuous, magnificent and over far too quickly; the middle section is bright and lively but doesn’t really get anywhere and by the time you reach the retirement section the film is clapped out and rather dribbles away.
The problem with the three hour cut is that a disproportionate number of the cut scenes come from this part and as a result the film is unbalanced, it takes up the best part of half the running time. Most of the added scenes are eminently disposable comic moments or simply more of the same.
Betty Blue is usually thought of in terms of being a sexy film but after the famous opening scene of the pair of them going at it in conventional missionary style under the picture of Mona Lisa, it is not the sex scenes that mark it out as different, it is the casual full frontal nudity. It is these moments, when they are standing answering the phone or making up a fold out bed that really give the sense that the film is offering us something raw and intimate, that we know these characters in a way we don’t other screen creations.
This is a neat trick as the characters are actually pretty thin constructions. Zorg is the standard undiscovered genius writer, Betty has a very convenient form of mental illness that compels her to do visually arresting self-destructive stunts. That it works is down to the two leads and in particular Jean-Hugues Anglades. The posters are Dalle’s but it is Anglade’s film. He’s the human one, the believable one in the relationship. He’s extraordinarily expressive.
In comparison Dalle is stuck playing a fantasy sex figure. She is the embodiment of the dour tragic male fantasy that if they were ever to meet a girl with a sexual appetite the equal of their own she’d inevitably turn out to be a nutter.
Though you never meet them I’m sure that there are purists who insist of calling it by the proper title 37°2 le matin but Betty Blue is more appropriate because like its heroine it is defiantly its own creation. It certainly isn’t a great film, indeed it’s often a bit silly but the passing of the years haven’t diminished it in the slightest and, seeing it afresh after all these years, it was rather lovely to find there is something undeniably magnificent about it.
Directed Jean-Jacques Beineix.
Starring Jean-Hugues Anglade, Beatrix Dalle, Gerard Damon, Consuelo De Haviland, Clementine Celarie and Jacques Mathou. French with subtitles. Blu-ray and DVD. Theatrical cut 121 mins, Director’s cut 185 mins.
This two disc release of Betty Blue offers the choice of the original two hour version or the three hour director’s cut. Curiosity demanded I went with the latter. What could a three hour version of Betty Blue be like? Well, very much like three hours of Betty Blue.
When Betty and Zorg leave their beachside shack at the end of the first act, some 45 minutes in to the film, I had hopes that this longer cut really would add a sweeping, epic dimension to Beineix’s tale of doomed love and lift it to a higher level. Some two hours later though it was clear that ultimately all it adds is another hour.
The film charts a romance that lasts around a year but the structure encompasses a life time. The early beachside scenes are youth and infatuation; the middle Paris section are the working years, the career years while the final section in a village in the Pyrenees is retirement and death. Sadly the film follows the scheme too closely – that early section is sumptuous, magnificent and over far too quickly; the middle section is bright and lively but doesn’t really get anywhere and by the time you reach the retirement section the film is clapped out and rather dribbles away.
The problem with the three hour cut is that a disproportionate number of the cut scenes come from this part and as a result the film is unbalanced, it takes up the best part of half the running time. Most of the added scenes are eminently disposable comic moments or simply more of the same.
Betty Blue is usually thought of in terms of being a sexy film but after the famous opening scene of the pair of them going at it in conventional missionary style under the picture of Mona Lisa, it is not the sex scenes that mark it out as different, it is the casual full frontal nudity. It is these moments, when they are standing answering the phone or making up a fold out bed that really give the sense that the film is offering us something raw and intimate, that we know these characters in a way we don’t other screen creations.
This is a neat trick as the characters are actually pretty thin constructions. Zorg is the standard undiscovered genius writer, Betty has a very convenient form of mental illness that compels her to do visually arresting self-destructive stunts. That it works is down to the two leads and in particular Jean-Hugues Anglades. The posters are Dalle’s but it is Anglade’s film. He’s the human one, the believable one in the relationship. He’s extraordinarily expressive.
In comparison Dalle is stuck playing a fantasy sex figure. She is the embodiment of the dour tragic male fantasy that if they were ever to meet a girl with a sexual appetite the equal of their own she’d inevitably turn out to be a nutter.
Though you never meet them I’m sure that there are purists who insist of calling it by the proper title 37°2 le matin but Betty Blue is more appropriate because like its heroine it is defiantly its own creation. It certainly isn’t a great film, indeed it’s often a bit silly but the passing of the years haven’t diminished it in the slightest and, seeing it afresh after all these years, it was rather lovely to find there is something undeniably magnificent about it.
