6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A beautiful, drunken, and promiscuous girl (Marie Trintignant) ends a disastrous evening at The Hole, a bar catering to the twisted and outcast. There she meets the recently widowed Laure (Stéphane Audran), an elegant retiree who lives alone in a luxury hotel. Laure takes Betty under her wing. Gradually, details of Betty's sad, sordid and, at times, sinister story of betrayal and self-destruction unfold in flashbacks as the women's relationship evolves into a lethal game of cat-and-mouse. Adapted from the novel by Georges Simenon, Betty shares many of the themes that made Chabrol's superb Les Biches (1968, starring Audran and Jean-Lous Trintignant) so erotically suspenseful...and Hitchcockian: The exchange of identity and guilt between two women of different ages, both in love with the same man.
Starring: Marie Trintignant, Stéphane Audran, Jean-François Garreaud, Christiane Minazzoli, Yves LambrechtForeign | 100% |
Drama | 66% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
French: LPCM Mono
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Note: This version of this film is available on Blu-ray as part of Lies and Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol.
Claude Chabrol has been decently served by the high definition era, with several of the French master's outings having been released on Blu-ray,
including several by Cohen Media Group and/or their Cohen Film Collection imprint. I've personally reviewed a bunch of Cohen releases of Chabrol
films, including Merci pour le Chocolat and The Color of Lies. More saliently in terms of this new
release from Arrow, however, are two previous Cohen releases, The Inspector Lavardin Collection, which Cohen put out in 2014, and 3 Classic Films by Claude Chabrol, which followed in 2017. Those two releases together
feature four of the five films that Arrow has aggregated in this set, and I'll be referring to my earlier reviews for things like plot recaps, as well as
more
technical aspects in terms of how video and audio quality stack up between the two. As tends to be the case, the Arrow release is stuffed to the gills
with supplements, which is one element in the Blu-ray world where Cohen tends not to offer much.
Betty is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. Arrow's insert booklet really doesn't provide any substantial information on any of the transfers in this set, offering only a generic statement that the high definition masters were restored and provided by MK2. As with the other films in this set which had a previous release from Cohen, detail levels are largely very similar if not completely identical, but it's the rather different color timing which may invite the most notice. While some others in this set have a noticeably blue or green look at times, Betty has an unmistakable yellowish quality which is quite evident. Note the overall differences between the first screenshots in this review and my review of the Cohen release, and you'll see that while Betty's jacket retains a crisp white look in both, there's definitely a yellow ambience to the Arrow release which is not nearly as evident in the Cohen. As with others in this set, this transfer looks at least marginally darker than the Cohen, something that can increase at least perception of suffusion, as well as highlighting a thick (and at times yellow itself) grain field. That said, outdoor material in particular here pops beautifully a lot of the time, with a warm, natural looking palette (see screenshot 3). I noticed no compression anomalies of any kind.
Betty features an LPCM Mono track which struck me as virtually interchangeable with the LPCM 2.0 Mono track on the Cohen release. Once again I'm not especially enthused about Matthieu Chabrol's score, but the music itself sounds fine, and all dialogue in this "talk fest" is presented cleanly and clearly. Optional English subtitles are available.
Chabrol is often compared rightly or wrongly to Hitchcock, and I'd say that Betty has the same sort of almost curiously dissociative quality that Vertigo in particular offers, where there's all sorts of psychological turmoil on display and yet the viewer may feel weirdly removed and distanced from it all. This is another presentation which shows marked differences from the Cohen release, but technical merits are generally solid, and the supplementary package is very well done. Recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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