Review: Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue on Criterion Blu-ray

Today, the aesthetic divide between Jean-Jacques Beineix’s extroverted noir debut, Diva, and his bloated, lusty third film, Betty Blue, seems much less gaping, particularly for viewers intrepid enough to regard his sophomore effort, the faux-pulp kaleidoscope Moon in the Gutter, as a homely missing link. Diva is genre-obsessed, an unwieldy meditation on dystopian thriller tropes and clichés that distracts us from its overwritten plot with shorn scalps and sexy jump cuts. By contrast, Betty Blue is character-obsessed, an unwieldy meditation on the self-destructing nature of domestic relationships that distracts us from its lack of amorous insight with nipples, dicks, and the occasional fork stabbing. And while the latter film is also likely to be condemned as the most prodigal of Beineix’s progeny due to its lubricious audacity and turgid running time, the three-hour-plus director’s cut ironically reveals a far less indulgent vision than that of the originally imported 120-minute digest—or, for that matter, of Diva.

The emaciated storyline fixates relentlessly on an intensifying partnership between the eponymous Betty (Béatrice Dalle) and her blithely deadbeat lover, Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade). They start out as little more than bubbly fuck buddies, and the film opens with its most “viral” footage—a lengthy, unbroken dolly shot toward the couple ravenously humping to orgasm—in order to ham-fistedly introduce their dynamic. But Betty eventually shacks up with her booty call in his oleaginous bungalow and reveals the mercurial irascibility beneath her perpetually hot, bothered, and often nude lady parts. After discovering a mammoth manuscript Zorg penned in his youthful days as a prospective novelist, she proclaims her man a genius and assumes the role of literary bitch-agent.

Wanderlust then ensues, so the two lovers set fire to the chili bean-stained bungalow and motor out to the French countryside. The remainder of the duration is devoted to observing their apoplectic devotion to each others’ least healthy attributes: Betty desperately and violently seeks a publisher for Zorg’s tome while he would much rather mix shots of tequila with seltzer. And in harsh contrast to the semi-graphic fornication, Betty’s dramatic mood swings bristle tetchily against the most rudimentary of social environments (e.g. the workplace, where she cannot suffer difficult customers, and Zorg serves the bullish clients pizza topped with rescued scraps from the trash bin as retribution).

That the film was adapted from a novel is gawkily evident not only in the bare details of the above synopsis (what fiction authors don’t dream up Ariel-like harpies such as Betty, who treats Zorg’s abysmal output like gold and sends snarling death threats to the publishers who reject his work?), but also in the loose, polyrhythmic plot movements that incrementally propel the central duo toward tragedy. Expanded to its intended length, the movie feels not like a failed narrative hastily washed in luridness but a purposefully meandering allegory of artistic frustration, especially in light of Betty’s eventual infatuation with the apparent unlikelihood of pregnancy—which turns out to be her fatal flaw. Contrary to expectations, the additional sequences only further obfuscate Betty’s psychosis, which still seems an irritatingly unnecessary speed bump in the characters’ non-careers, as well as an ostentatious crazy-chick gun introduced in the first act so it can be fired off in the third.

The breathing room provided by the added travels and more robust encounters with supporting cast members, however, marginalizes the woman of the title—or, rather, her “blueness”—to the point of an eerily affecting Macguffin. How much more insane can she be than the sex-starved grocer’s wife (Clèmentine Cèlariè) who demands that Zorg perform cunnilingus on her atop a pile of spilled bananas, or the friend (Gérard Darmon) who tasks Zorg and his clearly batty girl with minding his recently deceased mother’s piano store?

The events that lead up to the denouement are still maddeningly flat: Despite the tight, kinetic editing technique on display, Zorg’s bank heist, pulled off in drag, is a cheesy joke when we least need it. And Betty’s predictable self-mauling and subsequent mercy-killing offer fairly substantial evidence for our uneasy reading of the character as a sexist guignol; before asphyxiating her in her hospital bed with a pillow in the spirit of Ken Kesey, Zorg claws at her misshapen, torpid breasts with misguided virility, as though to say that true devotion is arousal whether your significant other is utterly off her rocker or comatose. The lion’s share of the film, though, remains a vibrantly bipolar tribute to writerly travail, which can, indeed, often seem as hopeless as impregnating a potentially barren, absolutely abusive woman.

Beineix’s camera captures the couple’s symbolic struggles with perpetually effective angles and color schemes, and he adroitly realizes clever cinematic gestures that would melt in the hands of amateurs; a quiet, crepuscular scene where Betty and Zorg diegetically acknowledge Gabriel Yared’s ersatz-blues leitmotif on a pair of unsold pianos may be the film’s most subtle triumph. If only Beineix could have imagined an existence for his star-crossed protagonists beyond the source material (the question of whether successful maternity would have sobered Betty yelps for an impossible sequel), he may have managed a sultry masterpiece.

Image/Sound

The restoration presented on this Blu-ray captures the sumptuousness of Jean-François Robin’s cinematography much better than prior home-video editions of the film. Although Criterion’s generalized description of the transfer as “high definition” rather than “2K” or “4K” may imply that the digital master’s resolution is relatively low for a Criterion release, it’s not evident in the disc’s image, which retains much of the warmth of 35mm—an effect vital to the mood of the film. The scenes depicting Zorg and Betty’s halcyon early days at a beach resort practically simmer, with the saturated yellows of the beach and the pink of the houses sharply defined. Accompanying the newly restored visuals is an uncompressed digitization of the original monaural magnetic soundtrack. The track allows for a fuller appreciation of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s playful manipulation of the plot—as when the sound of a saxophone played by Zorg’s neighbor pushes its way out of the confines of the beach fairgrounds and envelopes the entire film sequence, as Betty and Zorg paint houses into the night.

Extras

Criterion has assembled a number of valuable extras for this release: a recently produced, hour-long documentary about the film called “Blue Notes and Bungalows,” a short making-of video made during production and featuring Beineix and author Philippe Djian, a French television interview from 1986 with Beineix and Bèatrice Dalle, the actress’s original screen test, a series of trailers, a booklet with an essay by critic Chelsea Phillips-Carr, and a short film by Beineix from 1977 called Le Chien de Monsieur Michel. Beineix’s early short is connected to Betty Blue in one striking way: The piece of calliope music that one overhears from Zorg’s beach bungalow in the feature also serves as the theme of the farcical short, which sees a down-on-his-luck and not entirely un-Zorg-like loner forced into maintaining the illusion that he owns a dog. The short lacks Beineix’s later art-film flair, but it’s a wry, neatly told parable about communal life, with a social critique hovering at its margins.

As an erotic arthouse film that spends no shortage of time focusing on its young starlet’s body, today Betty Blue provokes questions about objectification, representation, and the treatment of women on set. Most of the special features brush by such questions. In “Blue Notes and Bungalows,” Dalle does mention that she wasn’t informed that she could request a minimal crew during nude scenes and later felt betrayed by her friend Beineix for not telling her, but she doesn’t seem to bear a grudge, and the documentary doesn’t follow up on this comment. Phillips-Carr’s insightful essay “The Look of Love,” however, compellingly addresses the film’s sexual politics, ultimately reading it as a “challenging portrait of a woman who cannot crush herself into the boxes provided for her, and a damning view of the male gaze that subsumes her identity.” To what extent the film undermines its own glossy visual appeal, of which Dalle’s body is an undeniable centerpiece, remains up for debate; Criterion certainly find’s Beineix’s flagrantly stylish imagery useful for promotion. But Phillips-Carr’s feminist perspective on the film is a useful reminder to look closely at the details of Beineix’s fraught love story, and not to dismiss out of hand films with such apparent appeal to the (hetero) male gaze.

Overall

Criterion’s release of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue recovers the sumptuousness and precision of its images, but this epic-length erotic drama remains part genuine exploration of romantic dedication and partnership, part indulgent male fantasy.