Back in the bad ol’ early ‘eighties, as I slowly began sampling further afield than the big-Hollywood classics frequently shown on basic-cable superstations and the crazed range of sleazy D-movies sprinkled in between the new releases at the local video shop, the first art-house theater opened in Rochester. Taken by an ambitious French teacher to see Le Dernier Combat–ironically, a film with almost no spoken dialogue, somewhat defeating the purpose the teacher had in mind–I was taken by the movie posters and started going back. Somewhere in there I saw Betty Blue.
Betty wasn’t the first French film I saw–I think my friends and I had done the new enthusiasts’ obligatory scouting over Truffaut and Godard, what little we could find–but it was the first to blow me away, one of the first films I saw that I felt confident engaging with as a filmlover, and like that great band no one knows or that obscure novelist who is yours and yours alone, I felt like Beineix’s crazed, lush, outsized Tragic comic Romance was *mine* in a way that those other French auteurs’ work hadn’t been.
All of Beineix’s work is apparently getting a re-release. And I do mean all: I got the dvd for “Locked-In Syndrome,” his short, lovely video doc on Jean-Dominique Bauby, the stroke-afflicted author and subject of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and it came with a very early short by him as well as a later documentary (Otaku) about certain strange childhood-fetishizing, strange-objets-collecting Japanese subcultures. (I think every disc will come with its range of extras.) Obviously, I make a pitch for Betty, but I also hope that the great Diva gets a reprise, and I have never seen either Moon in the Gutter or Roselyne and the Lions and I can’t wait. Even if they suck, as long-ago criticism noted, they’ll suck in that crazed, lush, outsized fashion which makes him so interesting to watch.
But a brief nod to the Bauby doc–I haven’t seen the Schnabel film, but this is brief, often lovely, but tough-minded. Like the best of Beineix’ work, the body and the mind are lovely not just as they are romanticized and idealized but lovely in their messiness, in the pain they cause, in the constrictions imposed. Many, many long shots of Bauby staring, mouth contorting — we’re invited at first to stare, to resist turning away, but as the documentary goes on a rhythm emerges where we accept, and start to immerse ourselves in the sounds and images and structured (but more repetitive, non-narrative) world he lives in. The short was okay, the other doc intriguing but too long (and ultimately aggravating–even if intriguingly attentive), but the Bauby portrait… wow. Great stuff.