WHAT: Though it comes highly recommended by Chabrol fans, I haven't seen Betty, and will defer to this excerpt from Ed Howard's review:
Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, the film is a deeply affecting study of addiction and disconnection. Marie Trintignant delivers an astonishing performance as the title character, exploring the confusion, depression, and fragility of this aimless young woman — as well as the undercurrent of emotional coldness and cruelty that perhaps lies beneath her surface frailty.
WHERE/WHEN: 7:00 tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
WHY: Aside from being a rare chance to see a Claude Chabrol film on the big screen, and to continue with the Georges Simenon series mounted by the venue, there's another reason to see this screening today in particular. Yesterday was ten years to the day since the film's star Marie Trintignant was tragically, brutally killed by her serially abusive boyfriend, a rock star who has used the ten-year anniversary of this horrific event to announce plans for a comeback. Trintignant, of course, was the daughter of French acting legend Jean-Louis Trintignant, subject of his own PFA retrospective earlier this year following his brilliant performance in Michael Haneke's Amour after a long absence from the screen following his appearance with his daughter in her last completed film Janis and John.
HOW: Betty screens in a 35mm print imported from the Institut Français
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Brian: Didn't see you there. Good audience. At one point Betty passes by Paris' MacMahon cinema, associated with 2012 SFIFF honoree Pierre Rissient,
ReplyDeleteand famous for its presentations of classics by Losey,Preminger, and....Walsh. PFA missed a cute opportunity to have the 9:00 show an appropriate One Eyed selection.
Everyone forgets the fourth Ace of the MacMahon for some reason: Fritz Lang. Wish I could have made it out to bring down the quality of the audience.
ReplyDeleteMy bad,I think the reason is whereas the three Americans were not yet taken all that seriously at the time the French championed them, Lang had been an established classic name at least from his German period.
ReplyDeleteSeems a sound theory.
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