Betty - Uma Mulher sem Passado

A drunken self-destructive woman called Betty (Marie Trintignant) wanders through bars and meets a man that drives her to a restaurant outside Paris called Le Trou (The Hole). She meets the middle-aged alcoholic Laure (Stéphane Audran) from Lyon, who is the lover of the Le Trou´s owner Mario (Jean-François Garreaud). Laure decides to take care of Betty and brings her to the room next door in her hotel. Along the days, Betty tells the story of her bourgeois life and her unhappy marriage to Laure and also recalls moments of her promiscuous life.

"Betty" is a depressing and dark film by Claude Chabrol with the non-linear and fragmented story of a promiscuous and self-destructive woman called Betty. Her non-likable character is never attractive to the viewer that does not care to what happens or has happened to her. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Betty - Uma Mulher sem Passado" ("Betty - A Woman Without Past")

Note: On 01 January 2025, I saw this film again.

What an unusual film and such a dark and sad place with the splendid Stephane Audran and Marie Trintignant adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon. I have never seen a couple of women drinking so much whiskey and it almost makes us ill it was so terrible. There is a lot of talking as well but there is decent dialogue and then the women and their sex and drinking as they almost die although in the end it is even worse with betrayal.

Psychological story of the friendship of two women and how one (and a nurse yet) comes to rescue the other.

It's a cautionary tale of the rigid social structure of a certain class of French family where children and wives are treated more like possessions than humans. Note how she isn't allowed to interact with her children..that is handled by the spotless Swiss nanny. Her husband buys her a mink coat, and rather than call it an expression of his love, he calls it an investment. No wonder she begins to drink! And yet she makes a lot of bad choices, which leads her astray from her family, which is maybe what she really wanted....

Marie T. was so sad..her eyes were so sad that I wasn't surprised to find that the actress herself had been killed. The pain in her eyes seemed almost unbearable.

I was disappointed in the end...it seemed to just drop off with not much explanation...I know European movies are much more likely to end this way, and yet I said "Huh?"...and yet I still enjoyed it as a portrait of an increasingly obsolete segment of French society.

This reminds me of a car wreck where people stop to gawk at the carnage. Betty is a lost should who has spent years using sex and booze to try to numb herself. Trapped in a loveless marriage, she once again resorts to her old habits--and is caught and thrown out without her kids but with a stipend from her rich ex.

The story begins with Betty on a date with a psychotic ex-doctor and she's becoming drunk VERY fast (I can't recall EVER seeing a character in a movie drink that many drinks so fast). When she awakens she's in the home of an older woman who has rescued her. And, slowly in flashbacks, we see Betty's story about her life--given in bits and pieces interspersed throughout the film. There were two problems with this method: first, it was, at times, pretty confusing following the action, and second, I just found myself not particularly caring about the character. She was a total mess.

It's a shame, as I have really enjoyed several other Claude Chabrol movies--this, unfortunately, isn't one of them. It only scores a 4 because the acting is good--the story sure isn't.

Claude Chabrol may be best-known for kicking off the Nouvelle Vague movement with LE BEAU SERGE (1958) and for being the French master of suspense; that does not mean that he dwelt exclusively in the thriller genre and, indeed, hot on the heels of Chabrol's unexpected adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY (1991), came this oddball feminist melodrama which, a minor effort though it might be, also proves a surprisingly engaging work.

Actually, the source novel for it was the handiwork of celebrated pulp writer Georges Simenon and Chabrol's film version is buoyed by a spunky central performance from the ill-fated Marie Trintagnant (the daughter of actor Jean-Louis and director Nadine, she died in 2003 aged 41 from a cerebral haemorrhage, following a beating-up by her live-in boyfriend!) and a quietly mature one by Chabrol's former wife and frequent muse Stephane Audran.

The title character is a woman who, marrying above her station, is subsequently thrown out of her house after she gives in to her baser instincts; as a result, she takes to an aimless existence on the streets, drinking and chain-smoking her nights away in the company of strangers. Thankfully, she is picked up from the gutter by an enigmatic middle-aged woman (with a much younger companion) who installs her into her own lavish apartment and gradually helps her pick up the pieces of her broken-down life. But the innately sensuous qualities of the waif-like Betty soon catch the attention of her benefactor's boyfriend and, perhaps inevitably, tragic circumstances ensue.

The low-key qualities of BETTY are countered by Chabrol's decision to structure his film as a complex maze of flashbacks which depict (and contrast) the stuffy, ordered, aristocratic lifestyle the protagonist suffered through in her married past, versus her new, chaotic but free-spirited present state. All in all, therefore, the film can be counted as yet another feather in Chabrol's prolific and largely consistent cap.