Jean-Jacques Beineix's 37°2 le matin | Betty Blue (1986; Director's cut 1991)

 

37° 2 le matin, the title of Jean-Jacque Beineix's remarkable film adapted from Philip Djian's eponymous novel, alludes to a pregnant woman's temperature, although the lead actor Betty (Beatrice Dalle's first performance) only thinks she's pregnant, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. The English title is a prosaic Betty Blue, and OK the first name is right and there are masses of blue in the film, but all the same...

Betty's partner is Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), and they're's drifters, marginals, just like many characters in this only highly visual example of what many critics consider to be 'le cinéma du look', an expression that Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma (May 1989) dubbed, and which critic Guy Austin has called 'style over substance, spectacle over narrative' in Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (1999). Roger Ebert found the behaviour of the characters 'senseless and boring', and mentions old 'dirty' French films. Wow, how wrong he was.

Betty has joined Zorg at Guisson-Plage near Narbonne, where Zorg has found a casual job painting the stilted houses pink and blue. Betty sort of helps him. (They later move to Paris and Marvejevols in Lozère, although what happens in the first part sums up most of Betty's behaviour).

Most reviews describe Betty becoming increasingly crazy, which can't be denied although she's an amazing (if tragic) force of nature: she acts on impulse and does things that are totally unacceptable: to keep to the first part of the film, she throws a pot of paint at Zorg's boss's car, shows the same man her public hair when he's behaved sexually inappropriately, and in the end throws a paraffin lamp into their temporary home after throwing their possessions onto the ground.

The very first scene shows pure sexual pleasure of the two making love, the scene culminating in a noisy orgasm on Betty's part. As you'd expect: she's pure id, and as she has no internal parental or policing force as a controlling superego, Zorg having great difficulty trying to tame her.

Initially, when she finds out Zorg has written a novel, she types it out (using one finger) and sends it off the various publishers, convinced he's a great writer, although Zorg hides insulting rejection slips from her. 

Towards the end she is recovering in a psychiatric hospital, strapped to her bed after poking an eye out: she never recovered from finding out she wasn't pregnant after all. The devastated Zorg feels he can only end her undoutedly future misery by smothering her to death. The version I watched on this second viewing was the director's cut, extending a two-hour film by one hour. Contrary to the late Robert Ebert, I wasn't bored for a second.