 |
Beatrice Dalle: few other women have created such affectionately crazy characters. And I don't mean affectionately crazy like rom-com Sandra Bullock tangled up in wedding dress crazy, I mean batshit tear your jugular vein out with her teeth while on top of you in bed crazy. That she can make such terrifying characters affectionate attests to her charisma and fearlessness; she's like Asia Argento's SCARLET DIVA with a mild case of rabies. She is, all the time, what Courtney Love used to be, at key drunken moments (not a dig, I love Love), and Angelina Jolie before she got Sean Penn philanthropic by which I mean, that precious moment when you're neither boring/shy nor boorish/belligerent, when you're awash in the mystic formula of fierceness. Dalle stayed fierce. She found the fountain from whence that fierce formula flows. She's the hot female version of Robert Mitchum in CAPE FEAR or Brando in STREETCAR. She's berserk so you don't have to be. It's okay to be turned on even as you're running for your life. And you better run.
She's played in many films, in many different but distinctly Dalle roles, but there are three unforgettable movies that, taken together, circumscribe a 20 year devolution of her screen persona: BETTY BLUE (1986), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) and INSIDE (2007). Taken together they form a loose, unofficial 21 year trilogy of taboo-busting French cinema wherein our heroine evolves from bi-polar sexually ravenous waif (BETTY) to batshit cannibal nymphomaniac (TROUBLE) to full-on female Michael Meyers / Jason unstoppable Kali womb ripper (INSIDE). Let's slow down and delve!
Blue kind of retro-actively launched the whole 'quirky comi-tragedy with casual nudity and sometimes random violence" French post-Rohmer subgenre; Trouble took the always popular vampire myth to its bloody extreme end, Gallic-style; and Inside fit the torture-porn mold of the late 00s if transposed to do-or-die agonies of childbirth and child envy. What's interesting is the way the movies are separate -- different directors, scripts, etc.--but Dalle plays the three in a way that can be read as a cohesive arc: character threads left unresolved in Betty continue through to complete homicidal psychopathology in Inside, the way RED kind of wound up the threads of WHITE and BLUE in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy.
And what a hell of a journey because, you see, this actress needs no makeup our double to be terrifying: she's got those teeth!
One thing our own Hollywood heroines never seem to have is scary teeth. This sad truth compromised the rawness of Rob Zombie's DEVIL'S REJECTS (2007) for example, with its scuzzy Manson family cannibals flashing top notch orthodontics, and--for a couple of them--voices lacking the deepening effect of decades of cigarette and meth smoke, i.e. thin and tinny (Sid Haig being of course the golden exception). See, in America our teeth are either perfect or godawful based on our parent's health plans or lack thereof; there is little in-between the have-braces and have-nots; the rich get even their minor imperfections sealed over and whitened; the poor can only watch in the mirror as their incisors and bicuspids overlap and twist sideways. With socialized medicine however, the very-crooked get fixed to merely crooked; the merely slightly crooked is good enough for the state, so deal. Dalle's lupine chompers are definitely in this unique, disturbing but not unsexy median; she is a truly brave actress and sexpot for not wanting to hide them. Their dark crooked contours especially shine in all their H.R. Giger glory in TROUBLE: hers are the castrating incisors that squeamish last-minute castration cop-out films like TEETH and HARD CANDY boast of, but are scared to deliver even on rapists (both films resort to a JK-sew it back on-kinda cop-out at the last minute).
She's played in many films, in many different but distinctly Dalle roles, but there are three unforgettable movies that, taken together, circumscribe a 20 year devolution of her screen persona: BETTY BLUE (1986), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) and INSIDE (2007). Taken together they form a loose, unofficial 21 year trilogy of taboo-busting French cinema wherein our heroine evolves from bi-polar sexually ravenous waif (BETTY) to batshit cannibal nymphomaniac (TROUBLE) to full-on female Michael Meyers / Jason unstoppable Kali womb ripper (INSIDE). Let's slow down and delve!
Blue kind of retro-actively launched the whole 'quirky comi-tragedy with casual nudity and sometimes random violence" French post-Rohmer subgenre; Trouble took the always popular vampire myth to its bloody extreme end, Gallic-style; and Inside fit the torture-porn mold of the late 00s if transposed to do-or-die agonies of childbirth and child envy. What's interesting is the way the movies are separate -- different directors, scripts, etc.--but Dalle plays the three in a way that can be read as a cohesive arc: character threads left unresolved in Betty continue through to complete homicidal psychopathology in Inside, the way RED kind of wound up the threads of WHITE and BLUE in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy.
And what a hell of a journey because, you see, this actress needs no makeup our double to be terrifying: she's got those teeth!
One thing our own Hollywood heroines never seem to have is scary teeth. This sad truth compromised the rawness of Rob Zombie's DEVIL'S REJECTS (2007) for example, with its scuzzy Manson family cannibals flashing top notch orthodontics, and--for a couple of them--voices lacking the deepening effect of decades of cigarette and meth smoke, i.e. thin and tinny (Sid Haig being of course the golden exception). See, in America our teeth are either perfect or godawful based on our parent's health plans or lack thereof; there is little in-between the have-braces and have-nots; the rich get even their minor imperfections sealed over and whitened; the poor can only watch in the mirror as their incisors and bicuspids overlap and twist sideways. With socialized medicine however, the very-crooked get fixed to merely crooked; the merely slightly crooked is good enough for the state, so deal. Dalle's lupine chompers are definitely in this unique, disturbing but not unsexy median; she is a truly brave actress and sexpot for not wanting to hide them. Their dark crooked contours especially shine in all their H.R. Giger glory in TROUBLE: hers are the castrating incisors that squeamish last-minute castration cop-out films like TEETH and HARD CANDY boast of, but are scared to deliver even on rapists (both films resort to a JK-sew it back on-kinda cop-out at the last minute).
Dalle doesn't need a reason to kill or castrate, it just comes naturally. Thus her crazy sexual frenzy in TROUBLE EVERY DAY is truly terrifying and sexy at the same time, putting the softcore sleaze of BASIC INSTINCT's ice pick murders to shame. The guy she eviscerates in TROUBLE isn't even that bad of a guy, just broke into the wrong house and didn't run when he had the chance, not unlike the poor string of sods falling victim to doe-eyed Marilyn Chambers in RABID.
I came the long way around to BETTY BLUE in early 1991. I rented it on the advice of a hot chick I was after, thinking me talking about it would win her heart. It was my first time actually renting a movie with subtitles that I didn't have to for a class. Now of course it's no problem, but you may remember that back then they were hard to read on VHS (sometimes they were just cut halfway off by the bottom or where faded white-on-white lettering?) But - a strong gin and tonic and 20 minutes past the credits, I fell 'in love' with BETTY. After hitting my third or fourth drink of the morning--felt like I understood the French! By the halfway point, I was ready to fight to defend this crazy sexy movie. I wanted someone to come along and denigrate it so I could rush to its defense. I swooned for Beatrice, I even had a mancrush on Jean-Hughes Anglade! I balled my fists, drunkenly enamored of them both, and the two friends they make and drink tequila rapidos with, crying over their absence, and the melancholy perfection of their piano duet. It was like I had fallen in love with a movie as a collective person, a person who couldn't walk straight or uncross her eyes, maybe, but if anyone made a wise crack I'd belt them one. Roger Ebert, for example, missed the point and thus decided everyone else missed the point, not him! Here's what he wrote about the film on Christmas Day in 1986:
Oh Roger, with that snide sexist comment your back-end misogyny is laid bare (even his word choice gives him away). Imagine if I dismissed VERTIGO so snidely: "people say VERTIGO is about obsession, madness, and castration anxiety, but it's really just a San Francisco travelogue, coupled to occasional shots of handbags." Imagine how mad Roger would get!! Yet it's far truer than what he says about BETTY.
See? I'm still fighting to defend that film, and YET, though I bought the DVD some time ago I've never even watched it. Maybe it's because it's such a drunk binge movie to me. I sobbed over it while drinking so much it's almost like an ex-girlfriend whose photos I no longer want to look at. Having since moved from booze to SSRI meds, maudlin Vertigo-style moping, adieu! Even when I watched it all the time I'd quit after around the 2/3 way in, and start again, rather than watching it all fall apart. Too damn painful.
Looking back, it was, I realized, the first subtitled foreign language film I really 'loved.' PERSONA and LA DOLCE VITA were both close seconds, but my love for them was like an undergrad English student's love for Shakespeare: trepidatious, intimidated, afield of my comfort zone, but armed by the knowledge if I could talk about them in the right company, I'd seem intellectual. If they were girlfriends, PERSONA would be that aloof beauty you end up heartbroken alone in your room over as she wanders off into the rainy dark to kill herself and wont let you follow. DOLCE is that party girl who stays up all the time doing coke and is ultimately shallow and cowed by Catholic guilt. BETTY on the other hand is the sexy girl you meet at a party and bring home and a week goes by before you realize she hasn't left, even to get her things--if she has any. And by the time you notice she hasn't even left, and try to stop fooling around long enough to think of an excuse why she needs to leave, she's clinging to you like a python and you're too hooked on her hotness to even resist when she crushes your rib cage or froths at the mouth from jealousy after opening your mail.
As her patient lover, the maintenance man, aspiring writer and part-time house painter Zorg, Jean-Hugues Anglade in the film can't go unmentioned. He's no mere 'beard' the way he would later become when strugglin' with English as a French cop in films like MAXIMUM RISK (1996) or as the default boyfriend for LA FEMME NIKITA (1990). Perfect as a drunken writer who loves his manic muse to the point he can only shrug every time she starts smashing the furniture, frothing at the mouth, and torching buildings, giving us that classic "what can I do?" Parisian shrug may make us mad when we're ugly American tourists trying to get directions to the Louvre, but in the context of dealing with psycho girlfriends, well, it's genius. He's aware on some level it's only a movie, so the damage is just imagery - her hotness is the only real thing.
I mention him because it's the lack of an Anglade in the later Dalle films that would signify the madness: Zorg would know when to walk away, know when to run, know when to commit to a sanitarium. Without him, Dalle runs amok and the dead bodies accrue.
Like SPECIES later, BETTY BLUE was one of the films I would watch over and over during drunken week-long benders, and yet never see all the way to the end, either stopping or passing out beforehand, over and over - just as well. The only time I ever got to the end was when I was too drunk or half-asleep to change the channel. There's a reason for skipping both - SPECIES ends with a tour-de-force of crappy video game graphics; BLUE winds up aping the pillow snuffing end of CUCKOO'S NEST. As Larry Fishburne says to Chris Walken in King of New York, who wants to see you in a cage, man?
Better to black out before then, so you can wake up and re-binge to the giddy joy of the first half, when the pair hook up with a similar nutsy, drunk couple, Lisa (Consuelo De Haviland) and Eddy (Gerard Darmon) and spend many a fun night drinking, singing, joking about Alpha Romeos, and dancing around the apartment together in silk kimonos (below, opening them).
This kind of 'letting go' between two in-love couples is something that seems uniquely French. Americans never seem to get this loose unless there's a skeevy orgy vibe, or a sleazy 'mixed party' stereotype like the scene with Jane and her friend bringing those boors back from the bar in COMING HOME. Here the vibe isn't lewd like an American salesman out of town or sad like some Antonioni orgy; this quartet have already had sex, a lot of it, and it's not sleazy at all. They're just happy to have another couple to celebrate their post-orgasm glow with. Their sex is lived in, free of American-style moral hypocrisy: it's widened all four of their perspectives and their collective giddy gratitude is contagious. Dalle's 'behind' is sexy albeit deglamourized by a pair of ugly loose silk women's underwear; Anglade, nakedly trying to hammer apart a couch with a lit cigarette; their nudity is neither the airbrushed slickness of late night softcore or fuzzy banal Emmanuelle eurotrash, but a beautiful offhand slacker sexual deadpan freedom. Zorg and Betty are a couple that would never sit still for the slow seductions of Rohmer, but rather plunge through the world like crazy screaming brakes-off banshees - and yet not like the abstraction of Godard aping Gun Crazy or the noir fatalism of Truffaut or the airless youth worship of Araki or post-modern extremism of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. It's the camaraderie of Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray, transposed to the joyously (but not tackily) sexual. You only realize what a rarity it is when you try to find it in other films. Or life.
Alas, it's sad it can't last even in the movies that convey it, those that divide the rush of joy at 'finding your tribe at long last' acceptance first half with a long downward spiral of overdosing, paranoia and cheap meth. We saw this a slew of late 90's and early 00's movies like BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), TRAINSPOTTING (1996), MONSTER (2003), IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG (2004); and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) -- all very open about the highs and lows of drug use and the family bonding of a shared high --that fast white light upward blast of the first Friday night MDMA-twinkle and ending with the long slow downward death spiral that ends with crying in the office bathroom on Tuesday morning when the last few molecules of molly leave the brain and takes all your dopamine with it.
If you were drinking the way I was, or just maudlin and 23 in a time before Prozac rose to prominence, it was the ultimate sorrow: 1990-1992 - the nights of fun with Eddy and Lisa were gone. My band broke up and college was over and there were no jobs and no weed (thanks, CAMP). The feeling was like you just got accepted by the cool kids and then the kids stopped being cool. It was rough. But thank god, the movies were there; Dalle howled a song to that roughness in its own language, like a Navajo code talker
It's that sweet remembrance of things past that suffuses the rest of BETTY BLUE, and dies totally in Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY. A glacial, mostly nonverbal film, offering no sense of joy or belonging, only the terror of imagining your own human carnal lust leading you to a grisly agonizing doom. Thematically (STD metaphor!) like Cronenberg's RABID and SHIVERS, you know Denis is going way farther into the nitty-gritty, to sordid, evil places that, for all his weird appendages and 'new flesh', a Canadian could never go) Being torn apart by a maniacal lover in a maenad ripping sexual frenzy, is something we don't usually see (outside of our imaginations watching SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER) Such a grisly union of eros and thanatos forces us as viewers into weird moral positions, like a game of Twister devised by a coked-up pope, as the slow and relentless tug of sexual desire drags lonely people to their deaths via a very long, snaking chain tied to an anchor above the Mariana Trench. We risk our lives every time we climb into bed with a stranger - but in some areas, the drive to procreate trumps even survival, not to mention our family and careers: midlife crises, film noir, and Beatrice Dalle.
Such scenes are few and far between in horror films. They make producers uncomfortable because--to put it a meta way--they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack. It's as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact--a rumbling and shaking--yet prevent any actual rupture of the concrete, no buckling or triggering of a massive modernist earthquake. In true post-cinematic Asia Argento / Samara fashion, Dalle's sexuality causes the simulacratic rupture of the screen, wherein the covetous eye of the viewer is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries. She's like a knife that springs out of the screen as soon as her image lures you close enough to draw blood.
 |
Variously dismissed, panned or gushed over by the few who've seen it, TROUBLE never really explains itself, presuming we're familiar with the pantheon of vampire and werewolf movies of ye olden times. For example, we can deduce that Vince Gallo is a chemist of the WEREWOLF OF LONDON / Henry Hull variety, tracking down a rare plant extract cure for his lycanthropic/vampiric malady. Gallo's malady is unnamed, but clearly causes an increasingly unbearable urge to devour and rend, especially during and approaching orgasm. Denis cuts back and forth between Dalle's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN-style handler (as he foolishly leaves her alone long enough for her to lure a pair of boys into the house) and Gallo on his honeymoon in a Paris hotel, where his stalker-killer lust is transferred from the wife to the cute hotel maid who comes in every day to make the bed. Dalle has devolved farther along in the disease, to where she can barely talk and spends each night breaking out of the prison her handler keeps her in, each night heading to the same lonesome stretch of road where truckers apparently pull over for sex, and are soon pulled to pieces. We can't really blame her. It's just a natural impulse.
Gallo and Dalle-- it's gradually revealed through incidental conversations--once had kind of a thing for each other while doing research together in Africa (where they presumably found the plant that afflicted them, thus linking this film to GANJA AND HESS!) and, as their paths look like they will intersect again, we brace ourselves for what the Netflix liner notes erroneously refer to as a joint killing-spree. It never comes. Denis lives to thwart narrative expectations. Sublime moments compensate: Gallo and his bride hanging out atop Notre Dame, whose spires covered in gargoyles bear a passing resemblance to both Gallo (his weird eyes) and Dalle (her demonic teeth) - in parallel abstract ways I'm sure were at least mildly intentional. I'm not going to start getting into the whole reptilian conspiracy thing (read up on it here!) but Denis' thoughtful inclusion of these images brings a kind of Antonioni-esque post-modern amnesia to the events. We don't need plot exposition because we know the story and all its variations, from books, movies, and myth, and maybe on some antediluvian level, direct experience. In not laying out lots of expository dialogue, Denis allows the associations and timeless miasma to form out of a thousand minor details. In other words, post-modernism!
I wont spoil the particulars, but the key moment, the grisly highlight, is the sex/devouring scene of Dalle's with a horny neighbor kid who breaks into her locked room, and of course gets far more than he bargained for. Shots of the kids' accomplice downstairs waiting nervously for him to finish, hearing the muffled screams of agony and his ambiguous reaction (presuming maybe moans of pleasure), reminded me a lot of a key scene, quite similar, in the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. And hey, that's a good thing (if you know what scene I mean) TROUBLE EVERY DAY has got a bad rap as being disgusting and dull, but I think, again ale Ebert, its this squeamishness critics have with seeing hot girls castrate their prey and not just talk about it or cop out at the last minute. I get grossed out by a lot of things, but for some reason I find female-on-male sexual mutilation to be quite positive, maybe as there's so much violence done in the other direction, I'm a big one for balance... and anyway, it's the fuckin' movies!
 |
| Inside (2007) |
Last in the trilogy is one of those 'one night timespan' films which I love, especially if they end at dawn. INSIDE tells the story of a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis) living in a ROSEMARY'S BABY-style bubble that gets busted open, literally figuratively and metatextually, by Beatrice Dalle's covetous vengeance-seeker.
And it's hard not to root for her as some kind of angel of feminine power. The patronizing treatment Paradis' expectant mother receives from her mom, the hospital, and her distracted boss sets the bar of pro-life patriarchal oppression at high right from the start, against which Dalle offers, at the very least, pre-biblical matriarchal alternative. There's a refreshing lack of "sanctity of motherhood" posing, an element so ingrained in the contemporary post-Spielberg/Ford American cinema that we only notice it by its sudden absence. With this disillusioning, we are made to realize that for all the babying, birth via C-section is a cruel and nasty business which no amount of drugs, sanitary surfaces and hospital hooplah can deny. INSIDE gets to the meat of the matter, with humor and a fine sense of real time pacing.
Here Dalle's beauty has 'faded' drastically, even from even five years earlier, when she shot TROUBLE. She seems to have aged a great deal more in those five years than in she did in the 15 between TROUBLE and BETTY. She's no Isabelle Huppert or Isabelle Adjani--two actresses who will probably stay hot into their 80s, but so what? While both Adjani and Huppert can play super fierce and fucked-up women when the role demands, our Beatrice Dalle is something else entirely-- she is that fucked-up fierce woman, and if art imitates life you could take these three films as something like a portrait of supersexy evil genius insanity through the ages. Hers is the evolution from a bi-polar nympho-brawler losing her shit over not being able to have a baby (BLUE); to sympathetic cannibal (TROUBLE), to a completely unsympathetic monster ready to grab a a baby right out of another woman's womb. But is it a tragedy, or a triumph? Doesn't being the monster mean you--and you alone--get to not be afraid of the dark?
Now, the ideas on display in INSIDE were, I thought at the time, just a crazy French sensationalists' morbid imagination. But, as the Investigative Discovery TV show Deadly Women has taught me, it's happened quite a few times in real life! In fact it happened in 2007, the same year as INSIDE came out! Sacre bleu!! Crimes like these prove that, when push comes to shove, women can be just as crazy sick as men anytime, even sicker. Of course here at Acidemic we call that a victory. Why? Because, again, at least in the context of our discussion, it's movies! No one is really getting killed by Dalle, and after all, by the end of the trilogy, Betty Blue gets what she wanted, a child, now she just has to not kill it.
Now, the ideas on display in INSIDE were, I thought at the time, just a crazy French sensationalists' morbid imagination. But, as the Investigative Discovery TV show Deadly Women has taught me, it's happened quite a few times in real life! In fact it happened in 2007, the same year as INSIDE came out! Sacre bleu!! Crimes like these prove that, when push comes to shove, women can be just as crazy sick as men anytime, even sicker. Of course here at Acidemic we call that a victory. Why? Because, again, at least in the context of our discussion, it's movies! No one is really getting killed by Dalle, and after all, by the end of the trilogy, Betty Blue gets what she wanted, a child, now she just has to not kill it.
CONCLUSION:
By turns tragic, comic, sexy, horrifying and terribly sad, this loose trilogy of BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE form a grand and very French salute to our great big beautiful Dalle, a woman not even slightly winded by patriarchy's desperate chokeholds. Even if she's burned alive, electroshocked, stabbed, strangled, or smothered, she still wins, one way or the other. She appeals to the cultured European melancholic degenerate in us all, the one who sees not clearly but too far, and who knows that--once you clear away the social more haze--sex and death are so close to one another along the fault lines of existence as to be inseparable. Step too close to the crack and you find yourself caught in the thin slice of ground between their gaping fissures and nowhere to go but down into the crevasse. How, after all, can you get back up and keep a safe distance now? If you are Dalle, you straddle that fissure, one foot on each side, like a ravenous goddess! See these three films and realize: to desire sex but fear death, or vice versa is to live an anxious lie, what Buddhists call samsara. Dalle is way past your samsara. She dwells in the harrowing truth. She's the bubble gum card fluttering in the wheel of life's spokes. Her terrible teeth rend the mundane irrelevance of man like a celluloid Kali.
By turns tragic, comic, sexy, horrifying and terribly sad, this loose trilogy of BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE form a grand and very French salute to our great big beautiful Dalle, a woman not even slightly winded by patriarchy's desperate chokeholds. Even if she's burned alive, electroshocked, stabbed, strangled, or smothered, she still wins, one way or the other. She appeals to the cultured European melancholic degenerate in us all, the one who sees not clearly but too far, and who knows that--once you clear away the social more haze--sex and death are so close to one another along the fault lines of existence as to be inseparable. Step too close to the crack and you find yourself caught in the thin slice of ground between their gaping fissures and nowhere to go but down into the crevasse. How, after all, can you get back up and keep a safe distance now? If you are Dalle, you straddle that fissure, one foot on each side, like a ravenous goddess! See these three films and realize: to desire sex but fear death, or vice versa is to live an anxious lie, what Buddhists call samsara. Dalle is way past your samsara. She dwells in the harrowing truth. She's the bubble gum card fluttering in the wheel of life's spokes. Her terrible teeth rend the mundane irrelevance of man like a celluloid Kali.
No comments:
Post a Comment