I saw this fantastic film the other day at our local revival theatre, and really wanted to share it. The director is Jean-Jacques Beineix, who along with Luc Besson and Leos Carax were barely keeping French cinema alive in the 80's. Beineix had a huge hit with his thriller Diva, but I think his next two films were even better, though critics at the time found them pretty indulgent.
Anyway, they just had a huge retrospective of his films here in town, and they're all getting spiffy new DVD releases. The one I saw, Betty Blue (1986), had an additional hour added to it a while back, and that director's cut is the one I saw. Clocking in at over three hours, this isn't an epic in any sense, but it's pretty exhaustive in the way it covers the span of a single dysfunctional relationship (even if the passage of time isn't very long). Hard really to put my finger on what was so unique about it...the photography is great, the actors all charismatic, but I guess it was just the little details and how it made something like a struggle for domesticity so interesting.
Oh yeah, the title character (played by Beatrice Dalle) is nude for a large portion of the film, and it's pretty graphic about the sex, though it's not done in a gratuitous fashion. The music by frequent Minghella collaborator Gabriel Yared is really nice too, and I downloaded the soundtrack immediately after coming home from the theatre.
Anyway, well worth putting in the queue after the DVD comes out later this month, and the other Beineix films I've seen, Diva and The Moon in the Gutter, are already out and are both fantastic. The latter is a visual orgy and very much in the vein of Coppola's One From the Heart (both films feature the insanely hot Nastassia Kinski as well).
YouTube - "Betty Blue" (Director's Cut) - Official Trailer [HQ]