"I had known Betty for a week. We made love every night. The forecast was for storms."
Adapted from Philippe Djian's 1985 breakout novel, 37°2 le matin became the icon of cinéma du look following Jean-Jacques Beineix released the lubricious three-hour-plus director's cut. The movement gives in to media consciousness and focuses on visual inventiveness, Betty Blue not only embraces this but is also driven by character development and highlights a perhaps self-destructing nature of domestic relationships. The story scopes in on a passionate love affair between an aspiring writer in his thirties who lives out as a handyman on a beach resort and a wild, impulsive nineteen-year-old waitress, Betty.
The films of cinéma du look are often criticised for being superficial and without content, a charge which Betty Blue was not exempt from. It certainly was not difficult to see the approach in the film's striking use of colour, from candy pink and turquoise paint for the houses to the lemon-yellow Mercedes and the scarlet dress Betty wears while warming her ass. However, despite the undeniable focus on aesthetics, it ultimately does not distract from the substance. As the characters grow, the attraction to the up and downs, sex and violence, mayhem and of course, tragedy, becomes simply sensational and irresistible. Contraire to the criticisms, I believe by taking audacious chances and doing unpredictable things with his camera, Beineix has lifted the heavy story into a moving picture.
The main attraction of the film is undoubtedly our two characters and Beineix's self-conscious imagery always sets the emotional tone for the scene when the peaceful everyman Zorg lets himself be swept along by the sheer force of Betty's personality, or when simply accentuating Betty's recklessness. The overly saturated colours, the intense lighting, and the characters moved from one idiosyncratic setting to another -- all of these create Beineix's world, a place where the implausible and the fantastic happen every day. Betty reading twenty-five notebooks in a single night; somehow turning them into typed copies with her single finger pecking style method; birthday cake put into car trunks lit and remaining intact even after a long and bumpy journey; Lisa's hotel where the only two guests are Zorg and Betty, and so on. The quirkiness extends to every character and almost every decision, but the film somehow manages to still be believably charming and distinctive, the relationships are not only well drawn together, and also moving. Beineix has created a world which I have entered and become part of.
The visual talents are lavished on Jean-Hugues Anglade(Zorg) and Béatrice Dalle(Betty) who spend much of their time on screen wearing nothing or sometimes, less than nothing. Anglade, slim and angular; Dalle, unconventional beauty with thick lips often in glossy bright red, perky body with rich Rubenesque curves. Of course, the wider public fixates on the movie's extensive use of nudity, but those critiques completely miss the film's complexity as well as sympathy for the heroine completely and fail to see any further than the surface. Betty is presented to us through Zorg's eyes, which at the same time, shows how damaging his gaze becomes. The maintaining of his idea of Betty as the wild and erotic fantasy she perhaps once was at the beginning, shaking him out of passivity and whose purpose is in awakening him creatively and sexually is in itself a neglection of, thanks to Dalle's outstanding performance, the petulant volcano about the erupt. Zorg fails to see Betty as a complete person and continues to ignore clear signs of mental illness. During the long three-hour edit, Zorg's unexamined privilege is painfully exposed and it became more and more difficult for me to identify with his placidity while witnessing his partner's torment. That is not to say the lingering camera around Betty's carnal appeal is in any way an exploitation, but what I think is rather an invigorating portrayal of female desire and agency.
Betty Blue may seem like a different film when viewing the first released version, but as previously mentioned, the director's cut three-hour long edit which came five years after its initial release paints Betty's downward spiral with much more calm interstice contrasts, it gives the already beautiful world an extra layer of colour, and it reveals a genuine romance at the film's centre.
Betty Blue opens with a bold introduction of the relationship by having a long precision frame of the couple ravenously humping to orgasm, as the camera moves slowly into the pair, Zorg states in the voice-over: "I had known Betty for a week. We made love every night. The forecast was for storms." I met Zorg as the handyman of some beach bungalows and is happy to be just that, not thinking about the notebooks full of his writing that he kept next to his bed. Betty acts in the opposite way, refusing to let him or the narrative stagnate for a single moment, she arrives at the bungalow only wearing an apron and carrying suitcases and declares that she is going to be living with him. Physical compassion is not the only thing we see, through it, there lay real tenderness and love. The couple is seen in the nude most of the time, it does not eroticise but actually paints the deep comfort and vulnerability of the relationship. After discovering the box of notebooks, Betty reads them overnight and simply decided that her boyfriend is the greatest writer of their time. They sit around, eating, drinking and laughing. Betty takes adorable Polaroids of the two painting the beach houses together, and they race to see who can finish first, like a childish game of sorts. But her temper and impulsiveness also start to show. She poured paint all over the boss's car when she was told that she had to earn her stay by painting every single bungalow, and after further clashes, she decides to burn down Zorg's shack and with it, the beach idyll comes to an end. The two flee to Paris where Betty's friend Lisa owns a hotel.
Zorg starts helping with various chores at the Hotel de la Marne where every room has a river view, while Betty throws herself into getting the novel published. They start forming a close relationship with Lisa and soon her boyfriend Eddy. They enjoy their time together -- music, laughter, drinking, dancing, food and coffee in the filtered morning light while Eddy shifts around in his colourful silk pyjamas. But the peacefulness is short-lived, Betty's warmth and optimism grow fragile as her obsession with Zorg's novel grows. She mails out copies to publishers -- even in the middle of the night -- and rushes to check the mailbox every morning, only to be crushed with every rejection. Their life in Paris whiplashes between cosy happiness, childlike in their unawareness of the world around them, and the harm and shock Betty causes when she becomes erratic with increasing frequency.
Our couple luck into another place after Eddy's mother dies and he asks them to run her piano store and take up her house. Zorg adapts easily and starts making friends with the town's colourful characters, and Betty's violence and irrationality worsen. She punches her hand through a glass window, chops off her hair and begins hearing voices. She has now pulled Zorg into her desperate world, he steals cash at gunpoint, and when she kidnaps a boy, she and Zorg run from the police together hand in hand. Of course, with mythically bad timing, Betty at the nadir of her self-destructive violence gouges out one of her eyes and is hospitalised in shock, just as Zorg receives a phone call from a publisher letting him know that his novel has finally been accepted and will be published.
One really interesting thing throughout the film is Betty's strives and struggles with traditional feminine roles. At the beach bungalow, she cooks wholesome dinners for Zorg and scrubs the floors on her hands and knees. After they move to Paris, she becomes Zorg's secretary, typing out his manuscript and sending them out to publishers. When she believed that she is pregnant, she revels in the idea of motherhood. With each attempt of squeezing herself into the conventional mould, to achieve domestic bliss is not only frustrated by the reality of the world around her but also completely, slowly and painfully obliterated by violence at her own hands. She refuses to accept her failures submissively and instead demonstrates her autonomy and agency through her outbursts and her ability to take action but ultimately destructive. At the same time, Zorg though he loves Betty, is willfully completely oblivious to the turmoil at the root of her outbursts. Dalle portrays a character with real complexity, Betty is at once the object of a man's fantasy and a real woman in psychic pain, which gives the film a fresh and unique take.
Without a doubt, Betty Blue's glossy surfaces and foregrounded spectacle made it one of the central films of the cinéma du look. Within the film's sensual aesthetics lies a challenging portrait of a woman who cannot be stuffed into the boxes prepared for her, and also a damning view of the male gaze that subsumes her identity and her struggles in order to maintain its own fantasy. But perhaps there is a reason for boxes. As for the original French title -- 37°2 Le Matin, I am not sure why it is 37.2 degrees in the morning. Maybe it foreshadows the coming fever and the coming storm.