One of the pleasures of living in a big city is the cosmopolitan cultural pleasures it offers and when I was a fresh-from-college designer working in London in the late 1980s I took full advantage and went through a phase of seeing tons of foreign films. And there were a lot to see too, back then it seemed like every week you’d open Time Out and there’d be a Jean De Florette, Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Au Revoir les Enfants, Cinema Paradiso, or Delicatessen that was packing them in at The Lumiere, Screen On The Green, Chelsea Cinema, or the Riverside Studios, and few things made me feel more like a sophisticated boy-about-town really living the metropolitan life than going to see a film with subtitles.

The one that really reminds me of that era and stuck with me ever since (not just for the reasons you might think) was Betty Blue from 1986 which is about the Frenchiest French movie I’ve ever seen. The plot is the classic Gallic cinema story of l’amour fou or “crazy love” with everything turned up to 11: a man living in a state of existential ennui falls for a wild, emotionally-unstable girl given to burning down houses and stabbing people with forks, they spend most of the film bonking the merde out of each other and the affair leads to madness and death — Fin. It was something of a succés de scandale at the time because of the amount of naked flesh on display and the lusty nature of their rumpy-pumpy — as a friend of mine said at the time about it’s notorious opening scene: “that’s not making love, that’s fucking” — but it was also memorable for the explosive performance of the astonishing-looking Beatrice Dalle as Betty.



Betty had to be played by an actress who could make you believe a man would happily follow her to Paris even after she had attacked his boss and set fire to his house and Dalle was the sort of girl who could make you kill your own mother if she asked you to. I used to wonder if there was a factory in France somewhere that did nothing but turn out pouty nymphettes for their movies as there seemed to be a never-ending stream of them from Bardot onwards and Dalle was like the model they produced the day they had an excess of parts to use up, giving her the most swollen bee-stung lips and biggest gap-toothed Gallic overbite you’ve ever seen. She looked like she’d just been punched in the face but also almost obscenely sensual as if she was permanently quivering with sex and just one look could melt you to a puddle on the spot.

I was a little obsessed with the film for a while, buying the video, poster, soundtrack album, and the (excellent) novel it was based on. If they made Betty Blue underpants I probably would have bought those too. Several years later I had a fling with a “Betty” of my own too, a dark-haired girl with the same voluptuous lips and big wonky overbite together with the same volcanic emotional ups and downs. Girls like that can be addictive, like Betty’s lover Zorg I put up with all sorts of crazy behaviour and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t worth it. Men, we’re such idiots sometimes.

Aside from it’s luscious cinematography the other part of the movie that was as gorgeous as Dalle was the soundtrack by Gabriel Yared, one of the few scores I can listen to on it’s own as a piece of music, with the best saxaphone theme in a movie since Taxi Driver.

Download: Betty et Zorg – Gabriel Yared (mp3)
Download: C’Est Le Vent, Betty – Gabriel Yared (mp3)
Buy: Betty Blue (DVD)

I’m under the cosh of an impending deadline at work right now so I’ll have to leave you these for your brains to chew on for a bit. Two old BBC films with the creepy atmosphere that 70s telly did so well featuring the great JG Ballard talking about the eroticism of cars and car crashes. Even if you think he’s talking a lot of silly bollocks (I’ve been in a car crash and believe me there wasn’t anything sexy about it) there’s still lots to enjoy: Sweeney-esque cars, the Westway, and Gabrielle Drake getting saucy with a gearstick.

Yes, that’s Rachel Welch wearing a Chelsea kit.

Even though I know this picture is real because Raquel was one of the many celebrity fans Chelsea had in the 60s and 70s it still looks like something from a dream I had when I was 12 years old.

Download: When I Dream – The Teardrop Explodes (mp3)

I may have to create a new tag called “Noel Edmonds is an annoying twat” but even he can’t spoil the magic of this.

A friend of mine was convinced that the “Cy Grant” who voiced Captain Scarlet was actually Cary Grant. While I must admit he did sound a lot like him somehow I doubt it was.

And is it weird that I thought Destiny Angel was really sexy? She was a bloody puppet! I also had a thing for Aqua Marina.

Inspired by a recent conversation with Davy H I dug out the soundtrack album to Francis Ford Coppola’s visually extravagant 1982 musical One From The Heart and sunk myself once more into its lush songs by the sandpaper-and-silk pairing of Tom Waits and Crystal Gaye. Listening to it also reminded me how heartbreakingly gorgeous Nastassja Kinski was in the film and the main reason I went to see it twice when it came out, her short-but-very-sweet role as an alluring trapeze artist was about the best argument I’d ever heard for running away and joining the circus.

With her exotic, pouty face and heavy-lidded eyes Kinski was almost dangerously sexy as if she’d been created for the sole purpose of driving men crazy and back then I would have gladly crawled on my hands and knees across broken glass just to touch the hem of her garment, or at least ask her to be my girlfriend. I wasn’t the only one either as she was usually cast in films as the mysterious object of desire that men would risk everything for (not just in the land of make-believe either, one famous director completely lost his mind over her.) In Cat People a man even risks being eaten alive by a panther just so he can have sex with her which, when you’re talking about Nastassja Kinski, seemed like a perfectly reasonable chance to take.

Download: This One’s From The Heart – Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle (mp3)
Download: Cat People (original single version) – David Bowie (mp3)