~ betty blue ~

Last weekend I watched Betty Blue for the first time. A child when it was released, I wasn't able to join the many college students at the time who had a poster of Betty taped to their dorm wall. Of course, I'm female, so that's probably another reason for me not to be part of the club. But last week, whilst holed up at my sister's Long Island beach house, I discovered this infamous little movie for myself.

I loved it. In the first five minutes, there was hard-core nudity, sex, dialogue about food, bad driving...most definitely a French film. Betty, we discover early on, is a bit of a nutter and prone to losing her temper often, culminating in her burning down her boyfriend's wooden home on the beach. So the girl plays hard to get and is constantly giving her long-suffering boyfriend hell - no surprises there. But it becomes apparent that Betty's schizo-tendencies are not just down to the fact she's a French woman. Rather, there is something darker afoot, and we follow along with Zorg as he struggles to hold onto the woman who's become his obsession and raison d'etre.
I watched the director's cut which came in at a hefty three hours, but it certainly was an interesting ride. Betty is not to be understood - she's complicated, like every modern woman, but there's something stranger that threatens to be unleashed every now and again. Zorg knows it's useless to try to change her, but you can sense his growing dread as she goes from stabbing an unhappy customer with a fork, through to knifing the cheek of a publisher who "had the cheek" to turn down Zorg's work.

It's a little zany, with a clever script and a great sense of how it feels to be a confused youngster in 1980s France; desperate to seize the day whilst knowing that tomorrow might never come.