DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Jean-Jacques Beineix managed to define an entire aesthetic of French cinema in the 1980s (“Cinéma du look,” which featured highly stylized visuals and stylishly disaffected youth) through just two films, 1981’s Diva, and 1986’s Betty Blue. The latter won the director wide acclaim and awards recognition, as well as equal amounts of derision among some critical circles. If nothing else, Betty Blue was ostentatious enough to result in impassioned critical arguments — a quality of provocation sorely lacking in a lot of modern cinema.
The film is adapted from Philippe Djian’s 1985 novel 37°2 le matin, about two young lovers bouncing around France trying to find their place in the world, as one of them succumbs to violent mental illness. Perhaps its most striking aspect – apart from the massive amounts of nudity and graphic sex, anyway – is just how much like a novel the movie feels. This is often a primary complaint: that no matter how skillfully the movie is directed, it can’t compensate for a story that hasn’t been adapted for the screen so much as it has been transferred.
The cut of the film currently making the theatrical rounds (for the first time) in the U.S. is Beineix’s final cut of the film, which adds a full hour to the running time of the original release. Critics who found it tedious before will no doubt find it half again as ponderous now, while those who hailed it as visionary will get more of what they enjoyed to begin with. For those on the fence, what this cut offers is a great deal more character development, which might have been slightly sacrificed in the shorter version in favor of all the full-frontal and mid-coital shots of the film’s distractingly attractive leads, Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle. Don’t worry, all that gaudy sex is still intact — just now with more talking! Expanded roles for the film’s secondary characters also help to flesh out the story. From my seat, the film is hypnotically engrossing, and a visual masterpiece, even if Beineix does have a tendency to throw logic to the wind. It’s unapologetically florid and poetic, as tragic romances often are; you may read that as pretension, or you can just let yourself get happily swept away in its sometimes ridiculously overreaching current.
View the (marginally NSFW) trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street.
