Beyond Blue
Directed by Jean-Jaques Beineix
Starring Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade
Original Score by Gabriel Yared
Tragedy - A classical verse drama in which a noble protagonist is brought to ruin essentially as a consequence of some extreme quality which is both her greatness and her downfall.
Merry-go-round calliope (a cyclical, blue music made with steam) wafts into a nondescript bedroom where a man and woman make ardent love. Zorg has known Betty for a week. "We made love every night. The forecast was for storms." On the seventh day, Betty marches to Zorg's beach bungalow and drops her suitcase at his door. She tells him she's just been fired from her job. Zorg and Betty are hot for each other and Betty needs a place to stay. Zorg's not much at saying "no."
Jean-Jacques Beineix, who also directed "Diva," has created a film that is modern, funny, complex, tragic and very French. Plentiful nudity and sex are an integral part of the film. And it's not just the woman's body we get to know (although there is a definite breast fixation going on here), we also come to know the man's.
The film plays, sounds, and looks much like a Fellini or Olmodovar flick. The camera studies the weird as beautiful and the beautiful as weird. The action and dialogue are comical/poetic. When Betty shows Zorg her positive pregnancy test he narrates "We made love. I had a dizzy sensation. While we screwed, her IUD was like a broken door banging in the wind."
With a similar impact as the score for "Baghdad Cafe," Gabriel Yared's musical score rings of second-string clowns. It is sad, haunting and hard to forget.
Visually there are sight gags galore. There's nothing like a little violence for a good laugh. As Betty throws pots and pans out the window of the cottage, Zorg's elderly co-worker George says "Your place will look very Zen now."
Zorg maintains and repairs 500 bungalows for the owner of the rickety beach resort he lives in. The morning after Betty moves in, the owner finds her and Zorg in bed during Zorg's usual work shift. He ogles a naked Betty, threatens Zorg's job and demands a usurious payback. Zorg jumps out of bed and offers the boss coffee.
Zorg's solicitousness is, however, outweighed by Betty's spontaneous show of disdain. Toward the end of the encounter she calls the owner a fat pig and pushes him right through the porch railing. He falls on a pile of sand, making the fall slapstick. Later Betty rebukes Zorg for his lack of pride. She implies that it makes him unattractive to her. Zorg can't imagine the issue being anything more than needing a private "place to screw" at night and he sees the exchange as the simplest means to that end.
Over the course of two run-ins with the owner, Betty pours a bucket of paint on his car (which Zorg dutifully wipes right off, rendering the statement meaningless) and burns their love nest to the ground (which Zorg can't undo). All they salvage, before running away, are some clothes and a box of notebooks which make up a novel Zorg wrote when he was bored.
Betty's obsessive effort to get the book published becomes her search for one success in her miserable lite. She finger-pecks the entire manuscript without stop then waits day after day for replies as if she is being judged as worthy or unworthy. Her identification is so strong that Zorg has to hide rejection letters from her. He suspects that his work is mediocre.
Zorg fears the ups and downs of Betty's craze to get his book published and asks her many times to forget about it. Betty does not want Zorg to accept his lot as a repairman. All of Betty's energy goes to fulfilling Zorg's buried potential.
Throughout the film, scenes of incredible sexual love are followed by Betty's reactionary violence. Friends and enemies alike are amazed at Betty's spontaneous acts. "You are crazy" is uttered at the end of a majority of scenes, but it is uttered in disbelief. She is not perceived as "by-the-book" crazy, especially by Zorg.
Zorg's understanding is that "Betty was a wild horse that had cut her hamstrings jumping over a wall and was trying to get up. What she thought was a meadow was a gloomy pen. She couldn't bear immobility. She wasn't made for that." In the beginning, especially, there is something appropriate, courageous and attractive about her outbursts.
As the merry-go-round in the beginning precurses, Betty is not suffering mere restlessness or spontaneity. It is a cycle of self-destruction and it is progressing. Zorg denies that there is anything wrong, as Betty shows more and more symptoms of schizophrenia.
Zorg lives in his own cycle. He eats chili whether the weather is hot or cold. He drinks beer. and tequila daily. He repairs things. He lives his life by habit.
Betty lives in a cycle of activity, failure, restlessness and breakdown. Anything disagreeable triggers violence and self-destruction. She hears voices. She cannot adapt.
In their symbiotic web, Betty reacts to situations and Zorg jumps in and repairs them. Betty and Zorg are totally intertwined and interdependent and they like it that way. Sadly, Zorg's denial doesn't protect Betty from her fate.
No one catches Betty before she falls. Like in a Greek Tragedy, she lands self-mutilated, restrained and alone in a mental hospital bed. Zorg's heroic "rescue" takes the form of euthenasia - dressed in her clothes he suffocates her with a pillow. His act of selflessness immortalizes Betty (if only in his own mind) bringing the lovers together forever.
Now, because Zorg is a writer and he narrates the film, one can't help but wonder whether Betty is a figment of his imagination. She is beautiful, thinks he is an artistic genius, wants sex whenever he does, acts on everything he is too wimpy to act on, and loves him above all else. She is by all accounts the ideal woman, even in her tragedy. She gives him adventure and gets his book published. She dies young and spares him the noise of everyday life. He is left with a life of reflection and Betty as muse. Not bad for an ambitionless repair man!
If you think l've given away the plot, don't fret. Knowing what happens to Betty and Zorg is only half as important and interesting as watching their complex characters reveal themselves.