Closer: Marie Trintignant in Claude Chabrol’s “Betty”

Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

 

When we see Betty in the opening scene entering a shady bar, her disheveled face, the void in her look, the bags under her eyes show us a woman at a very low point in her life, yet her white Chanel-style deux-pièce immediately hints at the good life. We already ask ourselves who she is and what’s happened to her. She chain-smokes and binge-drinks and when she is picked up by someone pretending to be a doctor, he drives her to Versailles, to a bar called Le Trou (The Hole), another dingy place frequented by all sorts of strange characters. She keeps on smoking and drinking, deliriously harking back to the moment that brought her to this state – Chabrol doesn’t let in on very much, he doesn’t give us the whole picture, just Betty’s face in close-up and snippets of dialogue, on the recurring music of Jonasz, and then cutting from a beautiful, made-up face in the flashback to the wreck it’s become of it in the bar – the clothes however are the same. Marie Trintignant’s face becomes one incredible character. Eventually, a glamorous middle-aged woman, Laure (an Yves Saint Laurent-clad Stéphane Audran), steps in to save her from the doctor, who turns out to be a junky. Unable to bear the painful memories anymore, Betty passes out and Laure takes her to her suite in a luxurious hotel. When Betty wakes up, Laure offers her accommodation for as long as she needs it, taking her under her wing. In fragmentary flashbacks, Laure and the viewers slowly get to know who she is.
 

Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

 

Chabrol has a strong stamp of individuality on his films. Hitchcockian and thriller impulses, shrewd humour, bourgeois mores… these are cinematic phrases that Chabrol prefers and which we encounter here as well. But through the character of Betty, closely inspired by Georges Simenon’s novel by the same name, and making the viewer see her story through her own eyes, the filmmaker throws the audience into the unknown.

We get to know that Betty married into wealth only to find out she was trapped in a world of domesticity by her handsome husband and his domineering mother. And as soon as she becomes pregnant with the couple’s first child, she is no longer seen for what she is, but just as the bearer, and then the mother, of her husband’s children. As a pregnant woman, she is advised by her family to stay in bed, and her mother-in-law and husband are always right there to watch over her. Even the role of mother is in name only, because the children are exclusively taken care of by the nanny: they are nursed, fed and only brought in to their parents for a good-night’s kiss. In the bourgeoisie world, the role of wife and mother is stifling. In fact, Betty had worn Guy (Yves Lambrecht), her husband, about her unruly nature, about the kind of libertine life she’s led, when he proposed to her. “You don’t understand,… that life, I enjoyed it,” she had told him. He said he understood and that they would start a new life together. She agreed to marry him, at first believing it could work, but soon realising she got trapped in an existence she had already felt she wasn’t cut out for and there was nothing she could do to change anything.

There are several shots that are incredible in establishing how disabled the bourgeoise role of a mother is: one is when Betty looks from her remote dinner table seat through the kitchen door where the children have their meal at the children’s table. Some of them are crying, yet no other adult seems to be aware of or bothered by that. Another moment is when the nanny brings the girls to the living room where Betty, Guy and his mother are, and when the older girl expresses to her mother her wish to stay a little longer with her parents, the mother-in-law steps in saying they should never give in to the children’s demands. Any close or prolonged contact between Betty and her children is forbidden. This realisation is so striking for Betty, that she becomes impassive to everything happening around her and takes refuge in drinking and carrying on affairs. It’s a return of sorts to her old life.

When she is caught in flagrante by her husband and mother-in-law, she is forced to sign a contract stating that she abandons her children and disappears from their lives. That is the moment that provokes her downfall, her inner turmoil reaching the highest depth, the moment before we meet her.
 

Betty, 1992. Directed by Claude Chabrol. CED Productions, Canal+

 

“I remember two long conversations with George Simenon that went on into the night,” Claude Chabrol recalled in the production notes that appeared during the theatrical release of Betty. “For Simenon, it was not our intelligence that proved the superiority of the ‘human animal’ (he loved this term). At this time – this was in the sixties – he was more fascinated with man’s survival instinct, a topic which greatly inspired him. It was during this time that he wrote Betty.” Betty’s thoughts turn from animal to social (when she marries and takes on the role of mother and wife), to moral and human (when she has remorses for sacrificing her daughters), then to animal again (when she resurfaces in the end), Chabrol explained in a commentary on the film. Betty gets away with her true nature. She is untamed. Her husband and her mother-in-law try to tame her, but they don’t succeed. Chabrol doesn’t try, he lets her be. Is she the victim of what Laure calls the “dead weight of society” or a monstrous and unworthy wife and mother? Chabrol doesn’t answer. Instead, he masterfully, through the very precise succession of the story, makes the viewer look a little closer and forbearing, through her own eyes, at Betty. And he does everything in his power to save her, even if it is at the expense of another woman.
 

Stéphane Audran and Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

 
Stéphane Audran’s Laure is the one who lets Betty live. She is a former nurse, as she tells Betty, who, after being married to a doctor for twenty years, until his death, left her home in Lyon and retired to Versailles, where she lives in a grandiose hotel suite and frequents Le Trou, whose owner is her younger lover, Mario (Jean-François Garreaud). Laure dresses in Yves Saint Laurent, and I think her wardrobe could be well described by the words Marie Colmant and Gérard Lefort used in Libération, in 1991, for Saint Laurent’s latest collection: “There is not an ounce of bluff or showoff, not a line that doesn’t fall exactly where you least expect it, not a colour that is not a perfect red or faultless cobalt. In short, it’s cool, controlled, imperial.” She is still the tall, cool, stunning Stéphane Audran, with imperious looks and detached manner that dominated the earlier films of Chabrol, from Les Biches and La femme infidèle, to Le boucher and Juste avant la nuit (often dressed in Karl Lagerfeld or YSL).

But whereas in those films she used to be the unconventional burgeoise woman, the kind that men committed adultery or murder for, in Betty she is a lost soul, too, a woman who dedicated herself entirely to her husband and who has never found out who she is. Betty and Laure share their stories as they keep the hard liquor coming, but what Laure doesn’t realise is that Betty, by recalling and confessing in Laure her descent, she starts to build up the strength to resurface again. And what Laure doesn’t also realise is that she will be the final piece in the puzzle that will enable the undomesticated bourgeoisie young woman to be free.
 

Yves Lambrecht and Marie Trintignant in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

 
 

Throughout the film, we often see Betty dressed in white (Gilles and Papy were the costumers for Marie Trintignant’s character). Sometimes it’s black and white, as if a reaffirmation of high-class elegance and status, but somehow the white always stands out. It’s white when we meet her, a philandering soul on the streets of Paris, it’s white when Guy proposes to her and she warns him about her tue nature and former life, it’s white when we see her with her daughters, warned not to give in and tend to them (that’s nanny’s business), and it’s white again when she leaves with Laure’s lover. It’s always white, but somehow different. Because there’s a striking contrast between her constraining two-piece suit, the only clothes we see her in in the present (everything else is in flashback) and the only clothes Laure sees her in, and the feminine, girly, flowing white dress she puts on when she leaves the hotel with Mario. She doesn’t wear that dress because it is a triumph of love over despair, but because it is a reaffirmation of the survival of her animal instinct. She hasn’t changed, she has just found a way to be what she wants to be.

Laure is wearing black when she sees Betty and Mario leave together from behind the curtains of her glamorous hotel room. “I love black because it affirms, designs, and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke,” said Yves Saint Laurent. Dressed in black and just through body language – the stone look in her eyes from behind the curtains, discretely pulling the curtain – Laure pens the closure even before the film ends.

 

Betty, 1992. Directed by Claude Chabrol. CED Productions, Canal+

 

“In many of Simenon’s novels, the central mystery, and the one that is never completely resolved, is the human spirit,” Chabrol concluded. “This is consistent with his creation of Betty, the character and the novel: a human being to be explored, yet whose secrets could not be full known or understood.”

Immediately after Betty and Mario leave, Laure checks out of her hotel. We soon thereafter find out that she has suddenly died at her home in Lyon at the age of 49. The end credits roll on the background of a Betty wearing black, taking dead fish out of the aquarium in Mario’s bar. And now we remember the first moment Laure and Betty met in the bar, Laure pulling a chair to sit at Betty’s table, with her back at the aquarium, lending her a helping hand. Every time they were in the bar, there was a view of the aquarium. And we also remember the moment Betty recounted to Laure about Thérèse, a girl from her childhood that Betty looked up to. Thérèse was a little older and sexually initiated and Betty wanted to grow up faster and be just like her. “She was always in black, she only wore a black dress,” Betty had told Laure. We hear Chabrol’s own words narrate: “Laure had died because Betty had to survive. It was one or the other… And Betty had won.” Jonasz’s Je voulais te dire que je t’attends starts to play again as we are still trying to unfold the secrets of the human spirit.

 

Marie Trintignant and Jean-François Garreaud in Betty, 1992. CED Productions, Canal+

 
 

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