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was miserable the summer I saw Betty Blue, living in a dead college town without hope of action. By day, I was an intern at the Meridan Record-Journal, working solid waste and obits. Nights I spent in a sweltering flat on Oak Street with my two goony roommates, Ben and James. We were going to be rock stars, but first we had to whack off.
The diet was pepperoni grinders and birch beer, the means of transport a Mercury Bobcat purchased for the princely sum of $250. The muffler of this vehicle came loose every third trip and scraped the road, producing a shrill aria and shooting sparks up behind the car. Such were the fireworks of my existence.
Into this dismal milieu came Betty Blue. James had a bootlegged copy, on Beta I believe, and we watched it in the basement of the house
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where the girl I had a crush on lived. She was upstairs blowing her hippie boyfriend.
The film opens with Betty (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) clamped naked under a poster of the Mona Lisa. This is not some coy, choreographed encounter, but several minutes of congress, their bodies damp, exposed, ardent, a certain stunned pleasure to the eyes. Zorg is on top and at one point he reaches down between Betty’s legs (I hadn’t realized this was allowed!) and she begins to whimper. Then she reaches down herself and the tempo increases, her lovely breasts begin to vibrate, his thighs tense, she bites his chin, he growls . . .
To this point, just through junior year in college, I had never seen lovemaking in a movie. Porno sex, the jackhammer variety, sure. But nothing so flagrantly tender. Nor had I seen — let alone taken part in — a simultaneous orgasm. I was (to put it mildly) hooked, engorged, delirious.
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She moves in, they drink tequila shooters, they go down on one another, life is good.
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But it wasn’t just the sex that got to me; it was the emotional danger of the story, the sense of love as a preamble to ruin. The film was French (this may go without saying) and the director, Jean-Jacques Beinix, showed the good sense not to load us down with backstory. "I had met Betty a week earlier," Zorg informs us, as they lie in a ravishing heap, "and we had screwed every night." The next thing we know, Betty appears on the doorstep of Zorg’s beach house wearing an apron and nothing else. She moves in, they drink tequila shooters, they go down on one another, life is good. Zorg works as a handyman to make ends meet. But one night, Betty finds an old novel he wrote, and becomes convinced he’s a genius. Then Zorg’s lecherous landlord appears, and we discover that Betty has rather serious anger-management issues. He makes the mistake of bullying Zorg. Betty throws paint on his car, pushes him off a balcony and torches the beach house for good measure.
The two young lovers set up house in Paris, then a small village. But Betty keeps going postal. Her brief stint as a waitress ends when she stabs a rude patron with a fork. With each outburst, she drifts further and further toward outright madness. And there is nothing cute or redeeming — nothing Gumpy, in other words — about her condition. Beinix refuses to romanticize the turmoil. His cinematography is achingly beautiful, but always tinged with the florid. In one shot, we see Betty staggering through the dusk in a flaming red dress, in another the sun has broken into fragments. Zorg refuses to abandon her. Loving her is clearly the most reckless act of his life, but he’s utterly helpless to do otherwise.
And who among us has not longed to feel this way? So desperately, irrevocably in love? That was certainly how I felt twenty years ago, watching Betty Blue for the first time, in that sticky basement. I wanted to be wrecked by love, or at the very least assaulted for a few weeks.
Did it happen that summer? Of course not. Instead, I drove the Bobcat into submission and pounded out my somber obits and sweated pit stains into my oxfords. But it can’t be taken as a coincidence that, upon returning to school, I got involved with a woman who was a dead ringer for Betty — the same dark hair, the same lush, protruding lips and square teeth. Nor that she believed in me as a writer, long before I considered myself one.
This was the less obvious allure of Betty Blue: the movie was wish fulfillment for young writers. Zorg was like all of us literary schmucks, just waiting for someone to recognize our true calling. I especially savored the scene in which Betty (having read his manuscript in one sitting!) cooks him a celebratory dinner. "When I think that you wrote that," she says, adoringly. "I’ve never read anything like it."
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It all goes bad for Zorg and Betty in the end. Of course it does.
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Can you imagine hearing such words? Spoken by a pale, horny Frenchwoman? Then she feeds you turkey and chestnuts and kisses your whole body? The fantasy haunted me for years. Hell, I would have settled for a turkey potpie and a handjob. I still would.
But it doesn’t stop there. Betty sets about typing up his manuscript — using only two fingers, mind you — and mails it to publishers. When one of them sends Zorg a nasty rejection ("I return this nauseating flower you call a novel"), she marches over and slashes the guy’s cheek with a comb.
Zorg arrives at the police station to bail Betty out. The cop seems like a hard case at first. But when he finds out Zorg is a writer, his expression softens. He hauls out his own novel manuscript and a bottle of vodka. "Publishers are all fucking assholes," he declares. I loved the idea that the world might be filled with just such a secret fraternity of writers, bitter and dreamy and ready to forget the rules.
It all goes bad for Zorg and Betty in the end. Of course it does. And the final scenes are impossibly wrenching.
American audiences, for the most part, missed Betty Blue the first time around. This was the late ’80s, after all. Our citizen-consumers were just beginning their long plunge into the cinema of pornographic violence. Not even the upscale reviewers seemed to understand what Betty Blue was: a sustained meditation on the perils of love — no crazy ethnic family or gay best friend for laughs, no serial killer to goose the drama. I can’t imagine that the twentieth-anniversary director’s cut will fare much better. It’s an hour longer than the original, twice as dirty and twice as sad. As a nation, we have proven astonishingly adept at dodging the bad news of our hearts.
But I plan to watch the movie again (and again) to remember who I was during that summer, how sore with the need for love, how brutally alone, and how — like Betty and Zorg — I secretly wished the pain would never end. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: | ||
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Steve Almond‘s new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy. |
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