Betty blue

National Review, Dec 19, 1986 by John Simon

Newman is an old--well, middle-aged --pro at this sort of thing, and he plays it swashbucklingly to the hilt. But as the other of these unlikely brothers, carom his arse off as he may, Tom Cruise simply hasn't got it. The only substantial thing about him is a large pile of hair, like a big, black paperweight trying to keep this flibbertigibbet from flying off his cue: Cruise does not so much play a pipsqueak as be one. Too bad that Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, a good actress, is stuck with a character that goes nowhere. Carmen is not a woman torn between two men or two lifestyles, only a third musketeer tagging along on a two-musketeer job. Helen Shaver manages to infuse a little life into the cliched Janelle, and Forest Whitaker stands out as a black hustler who takes Fast Eddie--but, of course, before Eddie gets his wonder-working spectacles.

BETTY BLUE, the latest piece of imbecility from Jean-Jacques Beineix, who gave us Diva and The Moon in the Gutter (the locus of all three of his films), begins with a medium shot of a couple having intercourse. This, as the camera inches its way closer, goes on for what seems like an unconscionable time (I speak cinematically, not physiologically), but we know that it is not pornography by the reproduction of the Mana Lisa above the bed, and that we are in the hands of an auteur rather than a mere cineaste by the couple's lying not lengthwise (as in an exploitation flick) but across the bed (as in an art film). There's no doubt left when--after due moans, grunts, and shrieks--the lovers grow limp, and the hero announces in voice-over, "I met Betty a week ago. We have been f---ing ever since.' At least, that's what he says in French.

Betty (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) proceed through a series of ever more bizarre adventures in which abject idiocy alternates with unmotivated violence, except when the two are felicitously fused. For example, Zorg has written an autobiographical novel that covers countless notebooks and would seem to have a longer memory than Remembrance of Things Past. Betty, who types with two fingers and keeps tearing up her first page, types it up and sends it to all publishers, which should have taken her twenty years. When one publisher returns the ms. with a baroquely rude letter where a printed rejection slip would have sufficed, she seeks him out and clobbers him. When a restaurant customer she waits on annoys her, she stabs her with a fork. When she can't have a baby, she stabs out one of her eyes. Even though the obstreperous Zorg has been rightly ejected from the hospital, he manages to walk back in, strangle Betty, go home, and calmly sit down to his second novel. The truly weird thing, however, is that another publisher accepted the first.

Or is it? The novel on which Betty Blue is based (37,2| le matin, by Philippe Djian) was published, wasn't it? The film was a huge success in France, and may well prove so here. It is, after all, a big step forward from those nasty old sexist films that bared only the woman. Now both actors are nude much of the time, and the oral sex is more graphic than ever this side of hardcore. Except that who knows which side is this side any more?