Betty Blue

Betty Blue is a 1986 French erotic psychological drama film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, based on the 1985 novel 37°2 le matin by Philippe Djian. The film stars Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade. It was the eighth highest-grossing film of 1986 in France. The film received both a BAFTA and Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1986. Plot Zorg is a thirty-something aspiring writer making a living as a handyman for a community of beach houses in the seaside resort at Gruissan on France's Mediterranean coast. He meets 19-year-old Betty, a volatile and impulsive young woman, and the two begin a passionate affair, living in his borrowed shack on the beach. Following a row with him where she tears apart and smashes up the house, she finds the manuscript of his first novel; she reads it in one long sitting and decides that he is a genius. However, after another argument with his boss, she empties the shack and burns it down. The two decamp to the outskirts of Paris, where her friend Lisa has a small hotel. Betty laboriously types out Zorg's novel and submits it to various publishers. They meet Lisa's new boyfriend Eddy, and the four have many fun times, often fuelled by alcohol. They find work in Eddy's pizzeria, but a fight erupts in which Betty stabs a customer with a fork. Zorg tries to slap her back to her senses. Though Zorg hides the rejection letters, Betty finds one and, going to the publisher's house, slashes his face. Zorg induces him to drop charges by threatening him with violence, saying that she is the only good thing in his life and she is all he has. Eddy's mother dies and the friends go to the funeral in Marvejols. There, Eddy asks Zorg and Betty if they will live in the dead woman's house and look after her piano shop. Zorg enjoys the quiet provincial life and makes friends with the grocer Bob, his sex-starved wife Annie, and various offbeat characters, but Betty's violent mood swings are a concern. One day, after an irritating comment from Zorg, she punches out a window with her bare hand and goes on a screaming flight through the town. Happiness seems on the horizon when a home test suggests that Betty is pregnant, but a lab test is negative and she sinks into depression and tells him that she is hearing voices talking to her in her head. Zorg, masquerading as a woman, robs an armoured cash collection van delivery headquarters, holding the guards at gunpoint, and tying them up.