The Jean-Jacques Beineix Collection: Betty Blue

Two haunting performances say it all.
Betty Blue is touted as an "erotic drama" by the distributor, a tag which sells the film grossly short. It certainly has frank depictions of sexuality and much nudity -- after all, this is a film that opens on a real-time extended sequence shot of two people having sex -- but to call this erotica is to miss the complete picture.

Betty Blue is an organic look at a troubled relationship in all its glory and ugliness, tenderness and violence, joys and sorrows, made possible by the director's sympathetic and unembarrassed eye, and the sheer dedication of lead actors Jean-Hugues Anglade and Beatrice Dalle. Seldom has a cinematic couple been better paired, and seldom with so much chemistry. Dalle conveys a world of psychological complexity in her face, her eyes seeming to shift with her inner beats. Dalle received the bulk of the attention for this, her breakthrough role, so it might be easy to overlook Jean-Hugues Anglade, a fantastic actor who's every bit as good as Gerard...

'L' amour in All it's Tragedy and Beauty
'Betty Blue', the movie that, as one reviewer put it,' sent shock waves rippling through arthouse cinemas everywhere' and introduced unforgettable 'Beatrice Dalle', a sort of modern day (though far wilder) 'Bardot', with an even more generous mouth. Who else but the French could pull off a film like this with such depth and style. An exploration of L'amour in all its beautiful and tragic complexities. Certainly to the faint hearted it may have seemed a little shocking. There is plenty of of full frontal nudity, both male and female (unlike the double standard in American cinema), and a very realistic sex scene to confront audiences in the very opening scene. But the erotica in this movie is really very natural with nothing perverse or kinky about it. It has an uninhibited earthiness about it that we have come to expect from French Movies. To others what may have seemed more shocking was the rather dark and depressing nature of the story, (if you haven't seen this movie don't go...

A heartbreakingly tragic film.
This is a heartbreakingly tragic film centred around Betty, (Beatrice Dalle) a beautiful but unstable young woman, whose instability - or madness - becomes progressively worse throughout the film. In the beginning we think she is just an admirablely rebellious and fiery person who is over-sensitive to slight and imagined insult. Later she is engulfed by these irrational and self-destructive bouts of hysteria for no perceptible reason. But this happens only occasionally; between times she behaves like a perfectly normal and happy person, as she has every reason to be. It is easy to become impatient with her. She keeps saying she has nothing to live for, that nothing she has ever done has worked out right, but how can this be when she is so much better off than so many millions of others, with beauty, two good friends and a good man who loves her to distraction despite everything? And she loves him in return.

Zorg (Jean-Hughes Anglalde) is an aspiring novelist with a novel in...

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