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Synopsis
Betty, adapted from the novel of the same name by Maigret author Georges Simenon, is a scathing attack on the uppermiddle classes, featuring an extraordinary performance by Marie Trintignant as a woman spiraling into alcoholism, but fighting to redefine herself.
Picture 9/10
The fourth dual-layer disc in Arrow’s box set Lies & Deceit: Five Films by Claude Chabrol presents his 1992 adaptation of Georges Simenon’s novel Betty. The film is presented with a 1080p/24hz high-definition in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The presentation is sourced from a new 4K restoration performed by MK2, more than likely sourced from the original negative (the notes don’t state the source for the scan).
Again, Arrow delivers a stellar looking presentation, though with one questionable aspect: the colours. As with other presentations in the set the colours do end up leaning a bit warm and yellow-ish, which can come off a bit heavier in some scenes (some specific interiors), a bit greener in darker ones, though not to the ridiculous degree other restorations in the last few years have (pointing at Criterion’s Varda set). Though blues are rare and lean more along the lines of cyan when they do appear, the whites still look closer to a warm white rather than a heavy yellow, and skin tones don’t come off jaundiced, or overly so at the very least. Black levels also come out looking strong and don’t appear to have been impacted by the colours, outside of a few nighttime shots that can come off a little murky, which appears to be related to lighting. Still, having pointed all of that out, comparing this presentation to an older master that shows up in the special features of this edition (for Chabrol’s select-scene commentary, made for an old DVD edition), where the colours are substantially cooler, I’d say this look was better and more suiting to the material.
Getting past the colours I have nothing but good things to say about the rest of the presentation. Outside of some minor specs and a handful of lines the restoration work has cleaned this up beautifully. The image is clean and stable throughout, no pulsing, jumps or flickers present. The encode is, as expected from Arrow, just about perfect, rendering the film’s very fine grain impeccably, which leads to a staggering amount of detail, the early shots of Betty’s (Marie Trintignant) weary face being especially striking.
In all, despite the colours maybe being a bit questionable, I thought this was a wonderful looking presentation. It’s very sharp and very film-like when all is said and done.
Betty - Screen Captures
Audio 7/10
The film comes with a lossless PCM 1.0 monaural soundtrack. Unsurprisingly, as a newer film, it comes out sounding sharp and crisp, with excellent fidelity behind voices and music. Range isn’t terribly wide, though this sounds to be more by design, and the louder moments we do end up getting don’t show any signs of distortion.
Extras 8/10
Arrow packs on some really good content for this title, starting off with another audio commentary by critic Kat Ellinger, following her track for the previous film in the set, Madame Bovary. Ellinger uses the time to discuss how Chabrol would focus on women in his later films, drawing comparisons to how women were usually portrayed at the time, particularly characters who were being presented as unstable, substance abusers, or “oversexed” as she puts it. Another “Betty” comes up when Ellinger mentions Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue as one of those counter points. She also looks at the film in terms of its presentation of class, brings up Bovary where appropriate, and quotes the director on the film. Again, like her track for the previous film, it’s been well researched and put together, she sounds to heave read the novel, allowing her to compare the film to the source, and she jumps cleanly from topic to topic while still managing to finish her points, unlike a couple of other tracks found in this set.
Arrow also throws in a couple of new video features, including a 16-minute video essay by film historian Ginette Vincendeau, which ends up being a nice summary around the film’s structure and how Chabrol and author Georges Simenon were pretty much made for each other. To expand on that, Arrow also includes a 15-minute interview with translator Ros Schwartz. This one ends up being one of the best new video features in the set, thanks especially to a couple of coincidences: Schwartz was an interpreter for Chabrol (she is the interpreter for Chabrol in that Ian Christie interview found on the first disc) and also worked on the English translation for Simenon’s novel. Thanks to those two facts, she’s able to talk about the art of translation and adjusting to individual author styles, is able to talk about Simenon’s themes in his work, and, thanks to having come to know him so well personally, how Chabrol was so perfectly suited to this particular novel. It’s a really wonderful out-of-left-field inclusion.
Some archival features are then included: a 3-minute introduction by Joël Magny, who more-or-less just summarizes the film, along with a select-scene commentary by Chabrol, running around 32-minutes. His tracks are very technical, and this is no different, the filmmaker explaining the reasoning behind his visuals (like the set-up for the flashback in the cellar), explaining them as a “faux objectivity.” It's surprisingly dense for its short runtime, and, as usual, he's good humoured.
The disc then closes with the film’s trailer and a small gallery.
Not as packed as I may have expected but it has a number of strong inclusions, particularly the interview with Schwartz.
Closing
The film receives an incredibly sharp looking presentation with one of the set’s better collection of supplements.
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