Betty Blue: The Look of Love

When we meet Zorg, he is a caretaker at a community of beach bungalows, though, as we will learn, he once took a stab at writing. He is content with his life, happy enough to live in his shack on the beach and not think much about the notebooks full of writing that he keeps in a dilapidated cardboard box next to his mattress. Restless Betty is his opposite. In Dalle’s ferocious performance, Betty refuses to let the narrative or Zorg stagnate for a moment. She arrives one day at Zorg’s bungalow wearing only an apron fashioned into a halter dress and carrying suitcases, and from that point on, she lives with him. 

There is not only physical passion but also real tenderness between Betty and Zorg. Beineix depicts the couple as often being in the nude, in a way that does not always eroticize the two bodies but sometimes just shows the deep comfort and vulnerability of the relationship. Beineix and Robin used the warm color palette of Kodachrome film as a reference, and this early section of the movie in particular is suffused with the sun-drenched charm of vacation photographs. After discovering Zorg’s box of notebooks, Betty decides her easygoing boyfriend is the greatest writer of his time. She cooks elaborate meals for him while he does his chores. 

A scene in which Zorg and Betty sit on their porch at night—eating, drinking, laughing, and thoroughly immersed in each other—begins with an overhead shot showing the brightly lit beach carousel, and the circuslike music we hear throughout the movie plays. She tells him, “I’m happy being with you. I’d like to stay with you if I can.” She takes adorable Polaroids of the two of them painting the beach houses those pinks and turquoises, and, like children, they make the job into a game, racing to see who can finish first. But Betty is also prone to mood swings. She loses her temper violently after learning that Zorg’s boss expects her to earn her keep if she is to live with her boyfriend on the property, and that they’re supposed to paint every single bungalow. Zorg tells her, “I’ll paint the whole town pink just to stay with you, kitten.” But ultimately, she burns down Zorg’s shack after clashing with the boss, and the beach idyll comes to an end. The two flee for Paris to live in a bohemian hotel owned by her friend Lisa (Consuelo de Haviland).

At the Hotel de la Marne, where “all the rooms have a river view” but no other guests besides Zorg and Betty seem to be in residence, Zorg helps with various tasks while Betty throws herself into the project of getting his novel published, typing it up from the notebooks he has written in longhand. In the meantime, they form a close-knit group with Lisa and, soon, her new boyfriend, Eddy (Gérard Darmon). This section of the film is defined by its spirit of communal living and good times—music, laughter, drinking, dancing, shared coffee and rolls with jam in the lovely, filtered morning light, Eddy in his gorgeous silk pajamas. 

But Betty’s warmth and optimism are fragile, as her obsession with Zorg’s novel has her mailing out copies to publishers—even in the middle of the night—and rushing to check the mailbox for replies every morning, only to be crushed when she finds rejections. So Betty and Zorg’s life in Paris whiplashes between a cozy happiness—in which they remain childlike in their unawareness of the world around them and their lack of care about what anyone else thinks—and the shock and harm Betty causes when her behavior becomes erratic and violent, as it does with increasing frequency. She stabs with a fork a demanding customer at Eddy’s pizza restaurant (where she and Zorg have started working). In response to a particularly harsh rejection letter, she attacks an editor at his home, slashing his face with a metal comb.

The couple luck into another ad hoc place to live after Eddy’s mother dies and he asks them to take up residence in her house in a provincial town and run her piano store. They are largely content at first, breaking down walls to make the place their own. In one delicately moving scene, Zorg plays a simple, sleepy song for Betty on one of the showroom models; she joins in on a facing one, sweetly in sync. A few days later, she makes her first piano sale, and Zorg beams with pride. He adapts easily, making friends among the town’s colorful characters, but Betty's violence and irrationality continue to worsen. She punches her hand through a glass window, bloodying their home. When the result of a pregnancy test turns out to have been a false positive, she chops off her hair and begins to hear voices. By now she has succeeded in pulling Zorg fully into her desperate world. He steals cash at gunpoint; when she kidnaps a small boy for an outing to a toy store, she and Zorg run from the police together, hand in hand.

In a case of mythically bad timing, Betty, at the nadir of her self-destructive violence, gouges out one of her eyes and is hospitalized in shock, just before Zorg receives a phone call from a publisher letting him know that his novel has finally been accepted. He goes back to the hospital to share the news with Betty, only to find her catatonic. He caresses her breasts as he expresses his sadness, then attacks the doctor who tells him Betty may need to remain an inpatient indefinitely. Returning late at night in disguise, he says a tender goodbye and then smothers her with her pillow, as an act of mercy. In a sense, having fulfilled her role—as a source of excitement, sex, and inspiration—Betty can be dispatched after her labor delivers Zorg to the next level of his life, leaving him free to go home and begin his next novel in peace. But all along, Beineix and Dalle have been complicating any simplistic view of Betty as merely a sexual object, a wild fantasy, or a creative muse. 

Throughout the film, Betty alternately strives to inhabit and struggles against traditionally feminine roles. She cooks a wholesome dinner for Zorg at their beach bungalow, or scrubs the floors on her hands and knees. Inspired by his supposed genius, she becomes his secretary, typing his manuscript and mailing it to publishers when he couldn’t be bothered to. And when she believes she is pregnant, she revels in the prospect of motherhood. But each of these attempts to squeeze herself into a conventional gender mold, in order to achieve domestic bliss, is first frustrated by the reality of the world around her and then completely obliterated by violence at her own hands. In other words, she refuses to accept these failures submissively, instead demonstrating her auto­nomy and agency through her outbursts, her ability to take action by being destructive.

Zorg, though he loves Betty, is willfully oblivious to the turmoil at the root of her actions: when she tells him she hears voices in her head, for example, his response is that it’s only the wind she is hearing. The complexity that Dalle embodies in her portrayal of this character who is at once the object of a man’s fantasy and a real woman in psychic pain makes for an astonishingly rich debut performance, and Betty Blue catapulted her to international fame. The actor has gone on to make dozens of films, including with auteurs such as Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, and Jim Jarmusch. 

Betty Blue’s glossy surfaces and foregrounded spectacle make it one of the central films of the cinéma du look. But within the film’s sensual aesthetics lies a challenging portrait of a woman who cannot crush herself into the boxes provided for her, and a damning view of the male gaze that subsumes her identity and her struggles in order to maintain its own fantasy of sexual and romantic objectification. Ultimately, Beineix shows us, the cruelty of misogyny requires that once we and Zorg are finally forced to confront the truth of who Betty actually is, we can no longer let her exist.