This 1992 thriller, based on a novel by Georges Simenon, presents Claude Chabrol in prime form. Chabrol was sometimes called "the French Hitchcock" due to his love of the master of suspense (he wrote one of the first studies of Hitchcock's films with fellow critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer) and his passion for making thrillers, mysteries, and psychological dramas.
It's Chabrol's piercing study of damaged characters and the self-destructive Betty in particular that makes this film so compelling. Marie Trintignant plays the boozy title character we meet at a bar: her eyes sunken, her expression blank, a dead smile greeting the man who picks her up and drives her from Paris to a private restaurant near Versailles.
It turns out to be a refuge for damaged souls and her damaged date inadvertently introduces Betty to the two people who will get her through her suicidal depression. First is Mario (Jean-François Garreaud) is the owner of the restaurant that seems to give strays a home, but more profound is Laure (Stéphane Audran), a maternal, middle-aged widow living in a Versailles hotel.
Betty's story comes in fragments like it's returning to Betty in flashes of memory: married to a successful lawyer dominated by a controlling mother, she escapes the suffocating family home in an affair with a young medical student. It's a distraction that becomes an act of defiance and, finally, the leverage for her mother to banish Betty from her world and her own children.
Neither mystery nor crime thriller, Betty is a psychological drama in two halves: the flashback story of a sexually-frustrated wife, a weak-willed husband, and a chilly matriarch who continues to command the lives of her grown children, and the present story of Betty as a woman adrift nurtured by the kindness of a stranger. Both stories are built on an almost Darwinian perspective on social survival. It's a brutal world and not everyone survives it. The unrated film features brief nudity and sexuality and is in French with English subtitles.
It's part of the Arrow Blu-ray box set "Lies and Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol." Features a new 4K restoration of the film, with commentary by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson, a visual essay by French Cinema historian Ginette Vincendeau, and an interview with the English translator of the George Simennon novel on which the screenplay is based. Highly recommended for public library shelves specializing in French films and classic thrillers.
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