First of all, instead of reading this, you should just go read Roger Ebert's review. It's hilarious. I liked the movie more than him, but there's no way I can be as hilarious as him.
Okay, are you done reading yet? Funny, right? Nobody did it better.
Anyway, BETTY BLUE is the tale of a stormy relationship between a young would-be writer turned handyman (Jean-Hughes Anglade) and a beautiful (but unstable) woman (Beatrice Dalle) who suddenly appears in his life. When I say unstable, I mean she does stuff like pour paint on her lover's boss's car, throw all of her lover's shit out the window, and eventually burns down the house on purpose. That kinda unstable.
But, our young hero loves her. Or, at least, loves to fuck her. No, he loves her.
In any case, thanks to their tumultuous lifestyle, the two lovers are forced to move from place to place, taking one odd job after another, falling in with one group of friends and allies after another. One thing that keeps them together (besides the sex) is the girl's passion for getting the guy published. Early on she finds his notebooks comprising a massive hand-written novel, decides it's a masterpiece, and becomes its only champion. And he likes this.
This is charming for a while, and I do think there is more to the flick than Ebert saw. There is a certain inherent drama to these kinds of relationships, and it is interesting to see the mechanics at work and fascinating to see how a couple of characters like this stay together.
Still, the version of the flick I saw clocked in at about 3 hours which was about 1 hour too many. After a little research it seems like maybe I watched the director's cut. I wonder if I would have liked the 2 hour version better. It's funny, I realize the 2 hour cut is probably a "Best of" of the entire running time, and they didn't just snip off the last hour, but my favorite parts were within the first couple hours, so if it did snip off the last one, that'd be okay with me. I liked when the two lovers were on the beach living in the little cabins. I liked it when they were trying to work in a friend's restaurant. I liked them less when they were running a piano shop 2 hours later.
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