Betty Blue

All right, one of them is the description of the James McAvoy character.

The description of his marriage as Gareth Gates meets Betty Blue is a very, very noughties reference, as is on the desk... on one of the journalists in the newspaper office is the stuffed monkey from the PG Tips adverts, which I think was then used in the ITV digital advert that I think was done with Johnny Vegas.

which, again, felt like a very obvious time reference.

I mean, equally as to the fact there are thesauruses on the desks, which, again, now felt quite dated.

There was, like, with cinema, and which again was something that one don't, did a lot, especially in your younger years.

There was, like, the mainstream films, and then there was all these angsty films like Betty Blue and Diva and-

Love it

...

Oh, okay.

Uh, he, he was in a movie called Betty Blue from, uh, 1986 that if I'm not mistaken is known as a feel-bad movie.

Um, it's a psychological drama.

Hmm.

And during that period, being the marvellous, I know, sticking with the 80s, did you embrace all the other things that were going on, like the films of the time, the...

Jim Jamew's films or Betty Blue or David Lynch and and that was was that kind of cultural period did that sort of seep into your life at all because I just remember being of a certain age being very excited with art house cinema and I don't know just embracing new things being young and wanting to um yes fine you know just finding one's identity I guess

I think I started to go backwards because I started watching things from the 50s.

Right.

yes, exactly.

We're going to be celebrating the 40th anniversary of my favorite French film, Betty Blue, 37 de le matin.

And on this occasion, we're going to do a little exhibition about the film in the Salon of Luminaire Hotel de Ville, which is one of our favorite cinemas.

We're going to be showing La Bataille de Gaulle about de Gaulle.

Hello, Luke here with your monthly taster of our main low-culture podcast that goes out exclusively to our subscribers.

This month we look at Jean-Jacques Benek's 1986 film Betty Blue.

A classic of the cinema du look, it was a commentary on the failure of both the Mitterrand era and the counter-cultural spirit of the 60s.

We address the elephant in the room of the sexual violence in the film and make a plea for the necessity of cultural criticism to navigate problematic art from previous eras.

Here's a small taster of this month's subscriber low culture podcast.

The idea of the sex stuff being...

Well, the sex and, you know, its kind of close relationship to violence in this film and mental illness... is I, you know, I'm sorry if this sounds like a cop out, but I think yet again, I think this is an example of why we have to have either like good discourse about art, but that's really aided by good criticism with a dialectic that finds a way through all of this stuff and educates viewers such as myself, you know, And I think bad criticism, cowardly criticism, if I'm being honest, is the kind of critique that says, well, you know, there's violence against a woman in this film, so it must be bad and we shouldn't watch it.

Because really that helps in its own way.

This is WPKN in Bridgeport.

Started out with Gabrielle Yorad, composer for the film Betty Blue, French film.

Bird songs of the Mesozoic after that, with a cover of a song by Brian Eno.

The song is called Somber Reptiles.

That was kind of impressive.

It's such an amazing instrument.

So then into our third three what do we got we started out with explosions in the sky with moving on eric blood so many things which is music from the film center of gravity came out in 2011 and pearl with two birds the song two birds is a track by the artist pearl from their 2026 album dream body which is i think just out or about to come out Let's go back to 1968, shall we, to the group the United States of America with Cloud Song.

And then I did the Wonder of Birds feature.

Obviously, there's plenty of people applying for the same either government grants or cultural grants or all those kinds of things that they have in place in the system in France in order to finance art, basically, and French culture.

But Claudia Assad, who is the producer, she... also produced Betty Blue, she produced, I think she produced Diva as well, but she was quite the visionary in terms of trying to look outside the box of what constitutes a French film, you know, because there is that kind of sort of snooty highbrow cliche about, you know, French cinema and it has to be approved by the government and the cultural minister and all that kind of thing, so essentially it's French propaganda.

You know, it's basically, it's not, you know, it's not in a wartime propaganda or anything like that, but they're definitely trying to make France look good, right? And attractive.

So she had problems trying to get a cannibal movie set in a dystopian future, you know, undisclosed date future.