Just for a moment, it was 1986 again. I was at university and having a tough time with my boyfriend. Oh, there was so much pain, so much woe. Once I remember finding a hideously erotic poem he had written to a gorgeous babe the year below me. Gina. How I hated her. How I hated him. It was a bit of an anguish-spiral, interspersed with torrid moments that usually took place during skipped lectures. I know, typical student life. Except this was 1986, the year in which anyone having a dreadful time with their boyfriend found their experience strangely glamorised by the cinematic tsunami that was Betty Blue.
Ah, Betty Blue. That Gallic paean to sex, premenstrual tension and the pleasure of throwing all your furniture out of a second-floor window. Before having more sex. We all wanted to be Jean-Jacques Beineix's eponymous heroine. We were her! We walked around wearing flirty pinafores with no bras, our hair casually up in scarves, our mouths painted with badly applied lipstick. Betty (Beatrice Dalle) was so easy to ape, an old-fashioned heroine, an innocent in a fantasy world of circus rides and smashed glass, who made having tantrums look glamorous.
And HMV has just released the director's cut on DVD, 60 minutes longer than the 1980s phenomenon. I went to the official screening. Before the show began, people in their mid-thirties wearing Converse trainers hung out sipping wine. This was our era. No one minded giving up a Friday night for three hours of nostalgia and a film that had ratified screaming fits in the refectory. I remember running down the street one night, barefoot and clad only in a towel, yelling after my disappearing paramour. Very Betty Blue. So what if it was in Hull?
The film itself proved a surprisingly tough watch. For one, it's no Amelie, the French millennium smash, where whimsy was the top line and the aim was to make people smile in a warm, nauseating kind of way. Perhaps the 1980s was an altogether more confident decade, when cinema audiences really got excited by endless screaming matches, forks being plunged into shoulders, slit wrists and in-your-face miscarriages.
On the other hand, viewing it as a smugly married thirtysomething, not a miserable twentysomething, was instructive. The film now seems cliche-ridden, with zero irony, and the director forces his star on such a one-track road of misogyny that, after 80 minutes had elapsed, it was clear there was nowhere else for the poor woman to go. After about the first 15 minutes, Dalle had already had around four orgasms, thrown everything out of the window and poured a tin of pink paint over the car of her boyfriend's boss.
There wasn't much more she could do, bar setting their beach-side cottage on fire. Which she triumphantly achieved in the next quarter of an hour. All due to bad period pains. Amelie might have been a bit too gamine for her own good, but putting everything down to PMT is not great plotting.
Dalle is still charismatic, though, in a gloriously ungroomed manner, and the film contains some great 1980s moments. If you were a fully conscious groover during that decade, I recommend a flick through the DVD. Yellow minidresses with black tights; post-coital cigarettes; tequila slammers; prophetic mentions of "the year 2000". Ahh. The way we were.
