37°2 le matin

It's a strange movie. For sure the best acting ever by Béatrice Dalle, she's the engine of the story, and she's very convincing. It strikes you with impressive force, helped also by an awesome soundtrack and a photography that takes your breath away. I've never forgotten this movie, perhaps the best french film I've ever seen. A cult-movie !

It was ten years ago when I saw the two hour version. Watching the director's cut was like seeing it for the first time. This version concentrated more on Jean-Hugues' character Zorg and his love and devotion to the mentally disintegrating Betty. The story takes its time, allowing us to understand Betty's illness and appreciate Zorg's erratic behaviour. The English title can be off putting because the expectations focus on the character Betty, played brilliantly by Dalle.

Sometimes a film makes a long, long journey.

For me this happened in several ways. The first is in real time. I saw this a couple decades ago in the short version. I was unimpressed. The word on it then was all about the first scene, how it was supposed to be "real" sex, as if that were important. I remember the film as a tepid failure.

I recently saw "H Story" and was blown away by Beatrice Dalle. So I sought this out, having forgotten seeing it. I was lucky enough to see the director's cut at over three hours.

Its an engaging thing, a rather delicate and rich journey within the thing, a well crafted love story. There are a hundred intimacies here, and most of them not directly involving the two romantically.

The main spine is musical. The couple end up owning a piano store and a piano melody is introduced which is so, so very effective it recalls how music was woven into the space between the two lovers in "Elvira Madigan." After we relate the pianos to their future, there's a terrific sequence — a meditation. Everything in the center of the film is meditative — a sequence where a piano is delivered on a huge truck, and certain dear things happen.

It still has a severely flawed ending, but the trip is wonderful. Cinematic love, a relationship born right. Two actors and a director who understand.

One thing I particularly liked was what I call the folding.The movie is based on an incompetent book and the story features an incompetent writer who turns that book into the lovely thing we see. And he does so in the fashion of "Moulin Rouge" and "Lolita" by largely making it up, or effectively so. He is an untrustable narrator. Betty may never have existed, or only existed partly. Or she may have existed and with her lover/writer created a new story. (I said it was intimate.)

We even see her typing the manuscript, transmuting it then and later in her actions so as to make it sweet.

This is love, when the story flows from two hearts.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

The Betty of the title is like a shooting star; she runs hot and bright, but she's burning up. _Betty Blue_ chronicles a torrid affair between a waitress and a handyman, initially in a broken down seaside resort. Betty is both passionate and unstable, almost childlike, and initially it is outsiders who bear the brunt of her anger - the piggish owner of the seaside bungalows, for example, or the playboy publisher who rejects Zorg's novel.

However, as Betty becomes more unstable and begins her descent into insanity, this rage is increasingly turned inward into self-punishing and self-mutilating actions. The same intensity that drives her sexuality and her love for Zorg is, ultimately, her downfall.

Over the course of the movie, which is quite long (I saw the 178 minute director's cut), Zorg goes to increasingly frantic lengths both to please Betty and to protect her from herself. In this regard, certainly, Betty and Zorg are almost identical, both going to extremes, in their own ways, to defend their relationship from outside interference.

As well as providing a narrative that may be read and interpreted on several levels, _Betty Blue_ is an exceptionally beautiful film in terms of cinematography and mise en scene. Colour is used to breathtaking effect - the blue floors of the piano shop, the yellow car, the yellow lighting which makes it seem as though, regardless of time, it's always afternoon twilight. Landscapes, city scenes, interiors are all set up and filmed beautifully.

A tale of love, sex and obsession not to be missed.

As well as being one of the all-time erotic classics (and I mean "erotic" rather than "pornographic") this is simply a fantastic drama, poignant and harrowing, funny and sad. Beautifully shot with amazing colours, quirky characterization, excellent acting and imaginative direction this movie is a delight for all of its 185 minutes (the director's cut is the one to go for). But when is this coming out on DVD? Will the US film company's have enough imagination to bring it out? We can, like Zorg at the end of this movie, only live in hope.