PAUL CLARK IS THANKFUL FOR:
BETTY BLUE (1986)
It would be a mistake for me to trace the birth of my love for movies to one film, and if I was foolish enough to do so, a better candidate would be something like Pulp Fiction. But while Tarantino pushed me down the road of cinephilia, I was still a sheltered suburban high schooler for whom subtitled movies were still, well, foreign. So I suppose it makes sense that my first experience with French cinema was motivated by the same factor that has led generations of curious moviegoers to the arthouses and dusty “foreign” shelves at the video store: sex. “Check this one out,” said the pierced twentysomething guy behind the counter to me and my pack of renting buds. “It’s French -- you know what that means.” And in the course of the evening, if anyone didn’t know what that meant, they would soon be educated. It wasn’t just the subtitles or the sexuality though -- Betty Blue introduced me to the sort of woman I’d never seen before in a movie. As played by Beatrice Dalle, Betty was a stark contrast to the teenage girls who mostly snubbed me throughout my high school years -- she was a feral life force, fiercely carnal, both sexy and more than a little scary. But even more than that, Betty Blue was the gateway drug that got me hooked on French cinema, leading me to Truffaut, Renoir, Godard, and all my auteurial pals. Not bad for a movie I watched primarily to see some tits.
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