Betty Fisher y otras historias

This is a beautifully crafted, visually stimulating, intricately plotted humane thriller--yes, all of those things humane. No, it isn't for casual viewing, people don't slam doors and shoot guns every five minutes, and yes, the viewer must be able to read subtitles to understand whats going on, as even the opening flashback happens so quickly and unexpectedly that we wonder if we experience what we just saw.

This is a puzzle film about parenthood, about children surviving in spite of a crazy world, a film contrasting social worlds and attitudes. Typically French in being thoughtful rather than action-oriented, the depictions of an off-kilter parent are all too real--and there are several of them. Not a masterpiece, but well-worth careful watching

This quietly compelling entry from French director Claude Miller was strangely marketed to American international cinema enthusiasts as an edge of your seat thriller. Based on the plot synopsis (best-selling novelist loses son to tragic accident, then crazy mother kidnaps "replacement son" for grieving daughter, then kidnapped boy's unpredictable mother and criminal friends seek to get boy back) I thought this was going to be good, and weird. Instead it was great, and weird, but not the kind of weird I was suspecting. Despite plenty of opportunity to do so, Miller never exploits or sensationalizes any of the intertwining tales of Parisian misfits begotten to misfortune both accidental and of their own making. He takes a meditative, and at times cold, though ultimately intimate look at human relations and diverging theories on what it means to be a mother. The "thrills" emerge from the fact that you never know what these interesting characters are going to do next. Miller pulls no punches. There's no pounding music score, fancy camera tricks, or melodramatic theatrics. The performances are as nuanced and natural as the direction. This is a perfect remedy for those seeking respite from Hollywood thrillers.

Set in France, and Paris, but not the usual one. Instead, we see the suburbia, and the projects. A rich woman, famous by a best-seller novel talking about her experience on NY, gets her strange mother at the airport, with her 4-year old son. Strange? A lot! Not crazy, but almost... The boy dies, and strange as she is she tries to mend her daughter's loss with a substitute: she kidnaps a boy of the same age and fit from a woman living on a project, almost a whore. One other story! More will follow, all nicely intertwined. Nice characters, the mothers, all of them, the lovers, all of them...

Look at the French title. "Histoire" means story and, as with the English word, implies all story's synonyms. "Histoire," then, can serve as a perhaps gentler "lie." So, "Betty Fisher and Other Stories:" It's a film whose plot is constructed of linked plots, a film in which strangers' stories intersect in ways we've come to think of as Altmanesque. But also, more intriguingly, "Betty Fisher and Other Lies:" Everybody's story involves a lie. Or everybody is a lie.

I booted up here, just now, fearing I'd only pan the film. The round-robin plot relies on glaring improbabilities and deux ex machina transpositions. It's so strongly plotted, I'd thought to say, it could probably survive one of those English language remakes, and weakly enough drawn in many of its characters that a such a remake might stand a rare chance of bettering it. Nonetheless, make a project of finding the "lie" in each character's "histoire." Which characters tell lies? Which lie to themselves, which to others, which to both? Is any character totally sincere? Is any character pure lie?

I'm not entirely sure whether it's the case of an actor stranded in an outrageously unbelievable plot, or of an actor acting for all she's worth to realize that plot, but Betty's plain-faced, ever-stricken, ever-lost expression, more than anything else in the film, stays with me. Though one needs a little French to appreciate it, "Alias Betty" may actually be a quite complex translation.

Sometimes the hardest things are so simple. A lost child is surely irreplaceable, isn't it? Well, that depends on how unconventional you're prepared to be. And if you've got no money but you're left looking after your sugar mommy's house, how to make ends meet? Depends how good a con artist you are. And if your mother presents you with a horribly unwanted gift which you can't return without getting you or her into deep, deep trouble? Maybe it will grow on you. Point of view is everything.

Three people with three problems. But that's just scratching the surface. Mothers, daughters, lovers, husbands, doctors, policemen, smugglers: all of life is here.

Adapted from Ruth Rendell's book "The Tree Of Hands", this French film presents lives less as part of a tree and more as a spider's web. A little tug here leaves a permanent distortion over there and a gap on the far side. Rarely can cinema have produced such a dramatic, amusing yet tense demonstration of the old saw "No man is an island" (though since most of the central protagonists here are female, the well-meaning but philologically-challenged PC lobby might wish for a slight re-phrasing).

With all these "Other Stories" around, there are two obvious potential pitfalls. Switch from story to story too quickly and you just confuse your audience; do it too slowly and they might fail to see the connections. Fortunately this film strikes the perfect balance; admittedly it does this by sacrificing a certain depth of character in some cases, but this simply leaves us wishing this were merely the first installment of a trilogy, or rather, chronologically speaking, the second. It would be interesting to find out how these characters got to where they are now, and, given the way that their actions have such dramatic effects on each others' lives, equally interesting to see how that spider's web changes shape in the future. Given that Betty Fisher herself ends the film about to start a completely new life, anything could happen. 8/10.