Betty Blue

A film set in France. Zorg looks after a stretch of holiday bungalows. He paints them, repairs them, and nobody expects anything else from him. Betty lives with him. Young, abrupt, and with no tolerance for anything. One day she finds what he has written. He wrote a novel years ago and the notebooks are in a box. Betty reads it. To her it is a masterpiece. From that moment she has a mission: to get the book published. From there the film is a wandering. They burn the place and leave, go to Paris, work at a pizzeria, settle into a piano shop in the provinces. Betty types. She makes a fair copy and sends it to publishers. Rejection letters come. Something breaks with each rejection. Her anger spills further out and turns into violence. What the narrative is interested in is not love but illness: its second half follows the course of a mental illness and the romantic frame slowly collapses. Zorg clears up after her every time. He objects at no point, and the narrative does not present that as a virtue either. The colour is the film's signature. Beineix uses blue, red and yellow heavily and the settings are more saturated than life. The music is by Gabriel Yared. The source is Philippe Djian's novel; the original title is 37°2 le matin. Béatrice Dalle had not acted before this; she met Beineix while modelling and took the lead at twenty-one. There are two versions. The release print runs two hours; the version the director prepared later runs over three, and the difference in tone between them is serious. The film was nominated for the foreign language film Oscar in 1987. Jean-Hugues Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon and Consuelo de Haviland are in the cast. Jean-Jacques Beineix directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes the visual vein of 1980s French cinema and difficult characters. Who it is not for: anyone looking for distance; the film gives Betty almost entirely through Zorg's eyes and that gaze is contested today.