Betty

When we first see Betty (Marie Trintignant), she's in a neat, oatmeal colored Chanel suit and an advanced state of drunkenness, picking up a man in a bar. He, apparently a respectable businessman out for a night of dissolution, takes her to an isolated bar called The Hole, where he appears to be a regular. As they continue to drink, he begins ranting, telling Betty she has worms beneath her skin before the barkeep spirits him away. Betty is rescued by Laure (Stephane Audran), an elegant woman of a certain age whose boyfriend, Mario (Jean-Francois Garreaud), owns The Hole. Laure lives in an expensive hotel nearby, and sees in Betty's lost soul...something; one isn't sure what. She takes the younger woman home to rest, and soon Betty moves in. The two women spend their days and most of their nights drinking pricy scotch and talking about themselves--mostly about Betty. Her past tumbles out: abused as a child and married to a rigidly proper man whose bourgeois family disapproved of her, Betty turned to drinking and promiscuous affairs. When caught and confronted, she signed away the right to see her children and turned to the streets, drinking even more and casually prostituting herself. Laure listens with grace and patience; one senses a subtle sexual attraction between the women, which resolves itself in cruel but conventional betrayal: Betty seduces Mario and steals him away. Laure, we learn in conversation, returns home and dies of something like a broken heart. We last see Betty at The Hole, with Mario.

Like Betty herself, BETTY is quietly beguiling and not at all as straightforward as it seems. What appears at first a melodrama about an unhappy woman, oppressed by prudish social mores and punished when she fails to live up to them, turns into a bewitching study of emotional vampirism. Plain, primly dressed little Betty seduces and destroys far more insidiously than any conventional femme fatale. She humiliates her husband (who, after everything, is still willing to take her back; she refuses), discards her lovers and drains away Laure's will to live. When, in the film's final shot, we see her peering into a fish tank, it's no surprise that several of the fish are dead.

Chabrol is an acknowledged master of psychological thrillers, including LE BOUCHER, BLOOD RELATIVES and LE CRI DU HIBOU. Though his films are often described as Hitchcockian, his sensibility is distinctly European; he favors talk over action and disturbing implication over overt violence. By American standards, BETTY is slow. But its leisurely pace is an integral part of the way in which the film works. Betty's transformation from bedraggled waif to ruthless, clandestine seductress is convincing precisely because it is so measured: there's no bravura unpinning of hair and tossing aside of glasses to reveal the vamp within. In fact, Betty's appearance hardly changes at all: Trintignant (the daughter of noted actor Jean-Louis Trintignant) conveys Betty's growing power purely through physical presence, a certain telltale stiffness of spine and languor of limbs. The film glides back and forth between flashbacks and present-day scenes of the two women in Laure's unpretentiously luxurious hotel suite; at first the flashbacks seem a series of revelations that will add up to a portrait of Betty and an explanation of her actions. Later, one becomes suspicious. Is Betty telling the truth? How much of what she relates is unconsciously shaded by personal interest, how much deliberately reworked to cast her in a sympathetic light? What does she want? Ultimately, Chabrol provides no answers beyond the obvious: Betty wants everything, particularly if someone else has it. (Adult situations, nudity, sexual situations, substance abuse.) leave a comment