Clean

CLEAN                       B+                  

France  Canada  Great Britain  (111 mi)  2004  d:  Olivier Assayas

A break-up picture, very much reflective of the personal separation of the director and his ex-wife, leading lady Maggie Cheung, who parted and went separate ways.  This is a character driven film, with a terrific international cast, but not always a seamless feel.  Don McKellar is Canadian, Nick Nolte is American, Maggie Cheung is Chinese but multi-lingual, and the rest of the cast is French, including the likes of Jeanne Balibar, Rémi Martin, and the always superb Béatrice Dalle.  As the film is in English, it occasionally feels somewhat unworldly, yet that is the distinct intention of the film.  There is a marvelous soundtrack, a trademark of Assayas, this one driven by the imagination of Brian Eno, which also includes a stab at singing by Cheung with the recording of the song, “Down in the Light” clean.wmv  YouTube (2:49), very much within her character, hushed, quiet, with very spare music underneath, sounding like the personalized, early music of Nico from the Velvet Underground.  This film could be her biography.

One is reminded of another film that centered around the what-about-me people in the music industry, featuring a dominant lead performance, Frances McDormand in LAUREL CANYON (2002), a film that didn’t live up to the strength of her performance.  While a lot didn’t feel right here, namely any sense of naturalness in the actual sound of the words, yet overall, it was quite intense and emotionally affecting, with bits and pieces that were superb.  There’s an in-your-face feel to the opening segment which lures you right into the muck and mire of the music business, a back-stabbing world of self-centered stars who believe the world revolves only around them.  But the music is hypnotic, as is a live opening act performance in a dream-like Annie Lennox mold, featuring Emily Haines, a Canadian indie phenomenon, the lead singer for Metric singing the song “Dead Disco” Dead Disco - Metric - Clean - YouTube  (4:33).  But things fall apart instantly, leading to a momentary disconnection between a heroin-addicted couple, a fading rock star and his Yoko Ono-like-blame-her-because-she’s-pulling-you-down girl.  There’s a beautiful widescreen expanse where she drives alone at night and sits in her car shooting up facing a lit up giant industrial plant in Hamilton, Ontario spewing its toxic waste into the air 24 hours a day, a metaphor for the effects of her own poison, both internal and external.  When she returns, the rock star has overdosed, his career instantly takes off, accomplishing in death what he could never accomplish in life, while she’s blamed for his death and immediately sent to prison for 6 months.  They have a young son, currently living with his grandparents, Nick Nolte and Martha Henry in Vancouver, and due to the potential added pain of her presence in the boy’s life, she is asked to stay away for a few years, so she flees penniless to Paris.         

Eric Gautier is the cinematographer, and his hustle and bustle street shots in Paris are just filled with energy and life, the camera is never still, it keeps moving, as does Cheung at that time in her life, continually looking for anything to get her life, her career, back on track, with absolutely no success.  This leads to two of the better scenes in the film, as Cheung tries to re-establish old contacts, first shooting pool with Dalle in a packed bar, as Cheung brings her a demo tape she made with another inmate while incarcerated, where the fluidity of motion is completely in balance with her fluctuating world, and the next is a near surreal, out of body experience, as she’s sitting in the waiting room to see Balibar, a cable TV executive where Cheung got her start, and her personal secretary, in a gutty and powerful appearance by Laetitia Spigarelli, starts recounting the story of Cheung’s life, including all the vivid details of an obvious infatuation.  What’s brilliant about this scene is how it creates such an exact picture in our imaginations, and then takes us elsewhere.  Yet the secretary’s bluntness is unforgettable, as is one of her later scenes where we see evidence of the secretary’s sexual domination of her boss.  All of this leaves Cheung out in the cold, where we hear the chilling effects throughout her emotional turmoil in the repeated refrain from Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” CLEAN (4:10), heard earlier in the industrial complex scene, a hauntingly spiritual ascension that became mesmerizing to listen to, but Cheung is startlingly and incomprehensibly rescued first by Dalle providing her a room, then by Balibar who pulls some strings to get her a low level sales job in a department store. 

Meanwhile, the family in Vancouver has flown to London for special medical tests, as the grandmother’s health is deteriorating.  Nolte has to come to grips with what to do with the child, as he feels unable to cope with him alone, so against his wife’s desires, as she holds Cheung responsible for her son’s death, a feeling transferred to her grandson, Nolte opens the door a crack and allows Cheung the opportunity to reunite with her son.  Nolte’s feelings are key to this film, as he breaks from his wife’s fervent wishes, and he loves his wife intensely, yet without his belief in forgiveness and the possibility for change, the whole self-absorbed texture of a tortured rock star’s widow might have been different.  As it is, it’s beautifully open-ended, all generated from a marvelous speech by Nolte when Cheung is finally honest with him, bravely transferring for the first time a little bit of family trust to her shoulders, with the little boy looking innocently in their direction, a heartrenderingly pure moment that is without an ounce of overreach.  This allows the first breath of air for Cheung to breathe in the entire film, as she’s been on the run, frantically searching in every which direction, and Nolte actually puts his arm around her shoulder in the most surprising of moments, which finally allows her the chance for redemption.  It’s just a momentary spark of recognition, without which, her life may have been emotionally shattered forever—again, a wonderful reflection of Assayas’s own personal break up with Cheung.   

Trouble Every Day

TROUBLE EVERY DAY                    B                     

France  Germany  Japan  (101 mi)  2001  d:  Claire Denis

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there.  Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees.  Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout.  Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera.  Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films.  At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh. 

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding.  However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting.  Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation.  Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion.  Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused.  While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror. 

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  When a young man’s (Nicolas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards.  While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail.  A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers.  Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied.  It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day...  YouTube (5:39).  A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.      

I Can't Sleep (J’ai pas sommeil)

I CAN’T SLEEP (J’ai pas sommeil)       A-   
France  Switzerland  Germany  (110 mi)  1994  d:  Claire Denis 

A witty and sophisticated drama of interconnectedness, much of this feels like a choreography of missed connections, where even well past an hour or so into the film the viewer still has no idea where this film is heading, and may still be wondering even after the final credits roll, as this is an oddball, character driven story where the characters take on greater significance than any story developments themselves, many of which simply disappear into thin air.  A perfect example is the opening sequence, where two helicopter policemen are seen enjoying a joke, including extensive laughter that continues at length, yet the viewer never hears the original joke.  Moreover, these two policemen are never seen again in the film and don’t at all figure into the action.  Nonetheless, they are the opening shot, flying high above the city of Paris and the connecting highways leading into the city.  From one of these random highways, we see an old beat-up car with foreign license plates, presumably Russian Cyrillic letters, where an attractive young (as it turns out Lithuanian) woman named Daiga (Yekaterina Golubeva) has a cigarette dangling out of her mouth as she approaches town, where the radio cuts to a breaking news story about the latest victim of the so-called “granny killer,” a string of murders targeting elderly women, presumably for petty cash.  However, another pair of clearly inept policemen *do* figure prominently into the storyline, as they keep popping up unexpectedly, usually in the development of some plot detail.  A seemingly disconnected shot reveals a young black man wearing a white suit, who turns out to be Camille (Richard Courcet), getting into a fight with a car passenger, who scrambles back into the car as it quickly drives away, as Camille’s white suit is a stark contrast to the two black garbage men who then pull into the frame, all staring at one another as if each is an alien from another planet.  

As Daiga gets her life sorted out, where there is a game of musical chairs played in the Lithuanian community to determine just where she will stay, much of this plays out in exaggerated caricature, comic portrayals rarely seen in any Denis film, where this actually more resembles the strange visit from the Hungarian cousin who arrives unexpectedly in America in Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984), one of the directors Denis worked with before making her own films.  Daiga ends up staying with an elderly Latvian hotel owner, Line Renaud (who can be heard singing with Dean Martin in the opening song heard on the car radio) where as it happens, Camille has a room at the same hotel with his boyfriend.  Daiga, who speaks little to no French, was led to believe she’d have a job in Paris, but when she sees the theater producer, he’s just been stringing her along in hopes he might get into her pants.  Completely in passing, Béatrice Dalle, who appeared in the Paris episode of Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), is initially seen sitting at an outdoor café, where her character is not even introduced.  Instead we meet Camille and his brother Théo (Alex Descas) with his young son Harry in another apartment, seen talking through a thin wall separating their beds.  Dalle turns out to be Mona, the child’s mother who has a hard time spending any extended time with her husband Théo,  who doesn’t appear to want anything to do with her.  He plays violin in a Caribbean band, seen here to Kali’s song “Racines” Kali-Racines-JaiPasSommeil - YouTube (4:03), and dreams of returning to live on the beach in Martinique, which completely leaves Mona out of the picture.  In a nearby apartment, there are loud cries in the night, presumably from domestic violence, but when Théo goes to investigate, they all look suspiciously at one another. 

While it’s a long, novelesque set up introducing all the central characters, working with more than thirteen characters, none of whom would typically figure in films we’re used to seeing, as they would be marginal characters relegated to secondary roles, but here it’s an interesting portrait of the alienating aspects of cultural diversity, something later explored in greater detail in Michael Haneke’s CODE UNKNOWN (2000).  In Denis’s film, however, these fragmented, often interconnecting episodes are largely unresolved, perhaps reaching a climax when Camille performs at a nightclub in drag, an intensely powerful performance where the audience stands transfixed, all standing just a few feet away, at his anguished “cry of love,” perhaps the theme of the film, but he never once returns their look, eventually turning his back, hiding the inner secrets to his soul, seen here to Jean Louis Murat’s “Le Lien Défait (The Broken Bond)” (J'ai Pas Sommeil - Claire Denis -1994 ), which casts a strangely mystifying aura over the rest of the film.  Camille has a volatile relationship with his own blond-haired boyfriend, mirroring the instability of his brother’s relationship, while the two brothers themselves rarely even speak to one another.  There’s a telling scene at their own mother’s birthday party, where each brother vies for their mother’s attention on the dance floor.  Everyone leads solitary lives, perfectly expressed by the largely unseen, lonely existences of the elderly who are victims of prey, all just part of the isolated lives of outsiders, where the difficulty to be accepted by the mainstream places particular pressures on this group, as they all appear to be drifters leading aimless lives. 

Instead of actions driving the narrative of the film, what’s more intriguing here is what isn’t revealed, what’s clouded under the layers of silences, especially between the two brothers who remain strangers to one another.  Camille arrives at Théo’s door with something to tell him, but then leaves without a word, earlier seen at a hospital clinic, where there is a noticeable mark on his cheek, but nothing more is revealed, where one might surmise he is HIV positive, but the director leaves this intentionally ambiguous, adding a brief sequence of Camille dancing in a darkly lit gay nightclub.  Daiga, who eventually finds work as a hotel cleaning woman, and who couldn’t be less interested in her work, appears to be the observing eyes behind the film, as we get telling glimpses of what she sees, like clues unraveling the mysteries of the film, where she sees behind the hidden lives, being near invisible herself.  This is a film of marginalized lives told through a recent headlines grabbing incident where there was an actual serial killer of elderly women in Paris.  While the killer is revealed, rather than deriving pleasure or enjoyment from committing acts of murder, the murderer kills with the same boredom and disconnection that plagues the rest of their life.  Denis provides a highly impressionistic, richly textured look at the hidden layers lurking underneath the incident, examining issues of immigration, disconnection, race, and urban alienation, where characters are often asked by authorities to see their papers, but the viewer can be overwhelmed by the loss of intimacy reflected in the film, and how easily the grief and sorrows of the marginalized remain forever invisible to the larger mainstream society at large.  

Process

PROCESS                   B+      

France  Great Britain  (93 mi)  2004  d:  C.S. Leigh

 Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.   

—Eckhardt von Horchheim  (1260 – 1327)

A very disturbing film – not as hated as Honoré’s MA MÈRE (2004) was at the Chicago Film Festival, but few found this scintillating.  Some simply dismissed it outright and found it easy to despise, thinking it overly pretentious and the worst that an art film can offer.  Stylistically exquisite, using a precise cinematic style which produces stark imagery from Angelopoulos’s cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, balanced by the unique and powerful qualities of Béatrice Dalle, the woman in black, from Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986) and Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Céci... (2002), once more putting herself on an edge of reality where none of us have ever ventured.  In this film, she never says a single word, but the camera meticulously follows her through 29 exacting scenes as she becomes further and further distanced from this world until eventually, through a series of long, abstract, unexplained viewpoints, we eventually see her take her own life. 

Emotionally unapproachable throughout, the filmmaker is himself a performance artist, book editor, former art critic and exhibition curator, also a teenage American fashion designer prodigy in the early eighties who uses a distinctively elegant visual design of minimalist detachment.  Opening with an apparent failure to drown herself in the bathtub, next Dalle is sitting before a mirror, an actress preparing to go on stage, hesitatingly putting her wig on.  What follows is the best scene in the entire film, beginning with a long, single take from backstage, the camera views a lit stage, the motionless actors on the stage, and the completely passive audience sitting in the dark in the background, under the lights, which are flooding the scene.  Dalle is unable to utter a single word, and the camera moves slowly past the audience, which is surprisingly polite, veering up to the top row where the theater staff are busily trying to figure out what’s wrong, which is shown by a flurry of movement of two individuals who manage to move towards the stage.  On stage, the actors light cigarettes, stare at one another, but Dalle turns her back to the audience and silently cries.

It wouldn’t be Béatrice Dalle if there weren’t a sexual scene involving two men, and here the violent, animalistic sex eventually leaves Dalle separated and worlds apart from the other two.  After an attempt to eat ground glass, we learn of several tragedies, that she has one breast missing from a mastectomy, but also that she lost her daughter in a car accident while she was driving, and her husband (Guillaume Depardieu) crippled, with the song "Freedom" performed by J Mascis & The Fog J Mascis and the Fog - Freedom - YouTube (4:20) blaring, and at the time, neither she nor her husband were paying any attention to their crying child in the car.  She spends the rest of the film shattered, erasing all meaning from her life, as she is seen blacking out line after line from books and diaries.  

Interestingly, the film is interrupted by the title and various quotations from time to time, also, strangely and mysteriously annoying, the film is not subtitled.  While there are only two scenes with words, one, a long extended sequence where she is burning all her possessions while listening to a voice on a tape recording, which began as the voices of her husband and child replayed over and over again, but this eventually becomes the monotone drone of a long, unsubtitled poem read by her husband, which turns out to be “Les Noyades (The Drownings)” from Poems and Ballads (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne, seen in its entirety here: Les Noyades—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Book, etext, including a critique of the poem by Karen Alkalay-Gut here: NOYAD18.  The poem references a series of mass executions, especially priests and nuns, as well as women and children, known as the Drownings at Nantes during the Reign of Terror at the onset of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.  There’s also a radio discussion on Holocaust denial with subtitles omitted, but that is the entire dialogue for the entire film.

By the end of the film, the musical track is a spare, hauntingly expressive, oblique piano score that sounds like chromatic fifths written for the film by John Cale, an eerie score that is an interesting counterpart to the lovely, yet spacious Arvo Pärt piano music “Spiegel im Spiegel” Intro - Gerry - Gus Van Sant - YouTube (5:21) that plays in GERRY (2002).  With the page open from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, an art book with a photo of a Holocaust victim, she tattoos her own arm to match the arm in the photo.  She takes a subway ride of death where, wordlessly, someone leaves her a suicide kit.  By the end of the film, Dalle is alone in an ultra-stylish, modern suite with giant windows overlooking the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, and a stream of traffic moving below, moving figures representing the life passing before her, the life she is leaving behind. 

There’s a brief epilogue, followed by a loud outburst of music that plays over the credits, a very upbeat song, sounding very much like David Bowie called “That’s Entertainment,” sung by a group called The Jam The Jam - That's Entertainment - YouTube (3:33).  There’s an interesting contrast between the passive audience in the beginning of the film and the audience that leaves the theater after experiencing this film, where the question becomes:  After witnessing death, are they still as passive and as emotionally uninvolved?

Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard)

 

SEVENTEEN TIMES CÉCILE CASSARD (Dix-sept fois Cécile Cassard)   A 

France  (105 mi)  2002  d:  Christophe Honoré

An exquisitely directed, well-written, beautifully edited film where Béatrice Dalle literally carries this film, as she is utterly fabulous, rivaling even the great Isabelle Huppert's THE PIANO TEACHER (2001) performance this year, and while saying little, this is one of the more strangely sensuous performances seen in years, arguably better than Samantha Morton's performance in expressing the exact same kind of morbid introspection from Lynne Ramsay’s MORVERN CALLAR (2002), another film about grief and loss that veers into an eccentric road movie.  Well so does this one, intensely expressed through a kind of experimental, non-narrative journey, where there are no mind-altering hallucinogenics, instead it's all based on a collapsing interior world, where the common theme seems to be disassociation, displacement, disorientation, someone who has lost touch with the world.

Reminiscent of several terrific films, Fassbinder's QUERELLE (1982) first and foremost comes to mind, as a kind of rampant homoerotic underbelly seems to thrive in this small seaside town, yet there is a woman in the middle of it, very much in the vein of Jeanne Moreau's role, and this film has one of the most elegant, sensual scenes of the year, starting with some unusually dark and exotic music, every move is slow, calculated, and perfectly choreographed, where Dalle is slow dancing with one shirtless man (Romain Duris) while another man smoking silently looks on, then the other man very sensuously cuts in and the two men dance together, 17 fois Cécile Cassard - Christophe Honoré Bande ... - YouTube (2:14), while she, in her red dress, can be seen in the mirror looking on.  Thematically, the film resembles Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS:  BLUE (1993), especially the extent of one’s withdrawal from the world after the death of a spouse, where rather than living in solitude, as she intends, people begin to intrude in her life, also Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), where modern technology leads to a kind of shock to the nervous system, where humans are completely alienated from one another, even during sex, trapped in an interior psychological wasteland.

This is a carefully crafted look at a more mature women who is looking to find her way back, not gracefully, as she is utterly fearless in making choices that, in some sense, none among us has ever contemplated, where the originality factor is the uniqueness of the experience.  Unable to function after the death of her husband in a car crash, Honoré offers an astonishing portrait of unending despair strewn out over just 17 fragmented scenes, where the mood is dead serious, pensive, yet odd, and always emotionally challenging, revealing a rarely expressed depth of emotion, initially someone on the edge of suicidal contemplation, then becoming lost in a kind of fevered sensuality, stuck in an aftermath state of oblivion that somehow leads to personal renewal, where she’s forced to literally rediscover herself.  Beautifully expressed through the offbeat photography by Remy Chevrin, a tone poem where every image is a work of art, complimented by original music written by Alex Beaupain, the heavy metal rock interludes come out of nowhere and are emotionally bone jarring, and yes, they absolutely rock us from any sense of calm or complacency and add to the continuously disorienting mood in what is otherwise a wordlessly quiet and spacious film.

Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin)

BETTY BLUE                        A-                   

aka:  37°2 Le Matin

France  (120 mi)  1986  d:  Jean-Jacques Beineix       Director’s Cut:  (185 mi)

I had known Betty for a week ... The forecast was for storms

—Zorg (Jean-Hughes Anglade)

Roger Ebert and his ilk dismiss this as nothing more than soft-core porn disguised as an art film, listed at one time as one of his most hated films, but viewers should look further. First and foremost, this is Béatrice Dalle’s first film, an incendiary French actress who always pushes her characters to the edge and sometimes beyond, and this is no exception.  She rivals Isabelle Huppert not in the quality of films she’s made, but in finding roles that are unusually “out there” and in her devastatingly unique performances of damaged souls.  Her relationship with Jean-Hughes Anglade, as Betty and Zorg, is idealistically intense.  And as they both prance around the set naked for a good portion of the film, drinking, having sex, eating, laughing, arguing, or just enjoying one another’s company, they certainly come across as a free-spirited couple, which is telegraphed right from the outset.  Some may remember the graphic eye-opening sex scene, but what I remember is the gorgeous setting on a beach in a run down, yet idyllic beach house perfectly captured in sumptuous photography by Jean-Francois Robin.  It is a perfect sunny day where the colors couldn’t be more captivating, the tone is utterly clear and bright, and this is the setting where the audience is drawn into the lives of Betty and Zorg, a young couple that believe they were made for each other.  Also of unusual interest is the hauntingly beautiful musical theme that Zorg introduces on the piano, a simple melody that feels like it’s floating on air and recurs throughout the rest of the film, utterly gorgeous, a lilting melody we can’t seem to get out of our heads.  As it turns out, it bears a striking similarity to a similar theme used in Abderrahmane Sissako’s WAITING FOR HAPPINESS (2002), which is among the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, “Djôrôlen” by Oumou Sangare oumou sangare djorolen (worry anxiety) YouTube (6:43) from Mali on her 1996 album “Worotan” which was released ten years after this film.  On the film soundtrack, written by Gabriel Yared, the song is listed twice in different versions under the song names “C’est le vent, Betty” and “Bungalow Zen.”  But the simple piano melody without any elaborate orchestration expresses it best, Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) YouTube (2:36).

The film is based on the Philippe Djian novel 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin, a writer whose every novel according to Amazon sells a million copies in France alone, also popular in both Germany and Great Britain, but is utterly overlooked in the United States.  This is essentially a love story told in two film versions, where the shorter version accentuates Betty while the longer Director’s Cut more prominently features Zorg, a strategy also utilized in Fassbinder’s BOLWEISER (The Stationmaster’s Wife) in 1977, which similarly features a longer three hour film version of a dissolution of a marriage in two parts that accentuates the cuckolded husband (Kurt Raab in his final Fassbinder performance), eventually revised to a shorter two hour TV version that accentuates the cheating wife (Elisabeth Trissenaar).  In each case I prefer the longer versions, as the style of filmmaking is exceptionally high quality and the devastation at the end of each is ultimately more powerful with the longer, slower build up which accentuates character and mood.  The two hour version of BETTY BLUE feels like it’s rushing to its ominous conclusion, feeling somehow overwhelmed, while the director’s cut emphasizes the slowness of the recurring musical refrain alongside unbearably long silences.  No explanation is given for Betty’s sudden retreat from reality, but the audience is able to share in Zorg’s own equally bizarre mood swings which border on the surreal. 

Beineix has a painterly eye for composition, freely moving his camera around to match the mood and energy of this breezy young couple barely in their twenties, intermixing solitary houses and landscapes with populated urban street scenes along with the more intimate intermingling of faces and bodies.  Dalle and Anglade are both terrific at making their relationship feel effortless and natural with simple gestures like eye contact, embraces, body language, their shared appreciation for food and incessant humor with one another, where they are clearly inordinately close and genuinely captivated by being in love, even as Betty exhibits a volatile temper prone to acts of violence.  From the outset on the beach, remembering how Betty sauntered into that door with breathtaking sexuality and allure, one would think this had the makings of an idyllic relationship, but far from it, the film turns the tables and really features in intimate detail one of the more dysfunctional couples ever captured onscreen, as Betty’s happiness turned tortuous behavior defies comprehension, especially for the man who loves her, who’s twisted all out of sorts himself trying to cope with her outrageously difficult demands, confounded by her irrepressible beauty and childlike vulnerability.  Dalle’s Betty is the kind of woman who completely embraces life to the fullest, whose effervescent spirit and boundless energy make her the object of every man’s desire, the center of attention, a woman impossible to resist, and God created woman, leaving Zorg no choice in the matter except to love her whole-heartedly every second of every day.  It’s a mad world where nothing makes sense except being in the throes of love.  Very few films capture that “need to love” quite like this one, especially that soaring elevation where we’re suddenly left flying without a net wondering how in the world we ever got up there, completely clueless how to get back down.