Modesty's Virtues

...As most moviegoers have known since The Moon in the Gutter played in this country last year, and as they should have known since his first film, Diva, received wild acclaim a few years back, this trendy French director has almost no talent to speak of...

...Yet it doesn't even succeed at that level, but rather drags on until you feel sure it is getting ready to end—and then drags on some more...

...Dome's dialogue moves along swiftly, making its points and then proceeding...

...In a matter of days the ex-hipster is transformed into something very like a Yuppie, whereupon Julius' wife loses interest in him and goes back to her husband...

...Betty Blue is strictly for Zeitgeistfreaks and other aficionados of the Here and Now...

...consequently, there is something faintly amateurish in the look of Men...

...Betty types up Zorg's manuscript, sends it out, and waits eagerly each day for word from the publishers...

...At first he pretends not to know, and you think he might just decide to take it philosophically...

...We see her enter, shut the door behind her, and later re-emerge as though nothing had happened—only to be betrayed by certain telltale signs of deshabille...

...The impassioned Zorg, thrown out on his first attempt to see his comatose lover, gains entry by disguising himself in drag...

...The acting ranges from the effective diffidence of Anglade to the uncontrolled histrionics of Mile...

...French directors these days seem to be preoccupied with sex, and the viewer of the first minute of Betty Blue will feel he is getting no less than the accustomed dosage...

...At first Stefan is dead set against the idea but, with Julius' coaxing and coaching, he applies for the job and gets it...

...He has just called in his beautiful young secretary...

...As you watch, you may find yourself thinking, ah yes, this is how they used to make movies in the 1980s...

...In doing so she has, in her unassuming fashion, fulfilled the ambition of all good art...

...If Beneix has any enduring interest, it is as an indefatigable exemplifier of the Zeitgeist—something that at least can't be said about all bad filmmakers...

...In the course of the next few days, though, the old double standard starts to dominate his thinking, and uneasiness gives way to obsession...

...At first he is rudely rebuffed by Stefan, who sees him as hopelessly middle-class, but by a dramatic and ingenious display of hepness he manages to win the artist's trust and is invited to move in...

...Dörrie is interested in the resources of film only to the extent that they assist her in the telling of the tale...

...When the rejections come, they are spiced with the most considered invective...

...If the bourgeois and "inauthentic" aspirations of Julius are made to look ridiculous, so too are the stereotypical bohemian prejudices of Stefan...

...Although the cinematography, a kind of Interview magazine come to life, is predictably the best thing about the film, it is self-conscious in an unwelcome way, as if calculated to make the viewer intone the platitude that each shot is like a fine photograph...

...Dalle, who was admittedly chosen with other things in mind...

...Every moment, every frame, every sequence of Betty Blue aspires to stand back from the immediacy of reality and reconstitute all things as facile and slick...

...And as the two characters exchange roles in the course of the film, Dörrie draws out of hiding the essential humanness that underpins their divergent ways of life...

...Now things seem to be going swimmingly, and Betty is delighted to believe she is pregnant...

...As with earlier works, there is enough violence, perversity and surreal scenery in Betty Blue to make it, in theory at least, a trashy thriller...

...Yet despite its deliberateness, Beneix's direction suffers from imperfections of a purely technical sort...

...Happily, this does not detract from its genuine strengths, the script and the acting...

...Julius' behavior throughout is characterized by a strange, risible eccentricity...

...The two main actors —Lauterbach as the energetic man of action, Ochsenknecht as the dreamy romantic who wistfully recalls his glory years in the late '60s—are especially endearing and believable...

...Zorg is a house painter living in a kind of bungalow village—a dusty, windswept, sparsely inhabited place that looks more like aNevada ghost town than the French hamlet it is supposed to be...

...On Screen MODESTY'S VITUES BY JAMES GARDNER Doris Dorree's new comedy, Men, is being hailed as a radical departure from what we have come to expect German cinema to be like in recent years...

...But the great surprise is that the subversion never comes: Dörrie has something more serious and, I believe, far more admirable in mind...

...when once she comes over, Julius dons a gorilla mask and, to the delight of his unwitting wife, runs ranting around the room...

...Men comes across as a celebration of balance and common sense precisely because Dörrie is so deft at reducing diametrical extremes to absurdity...

...After the sadomasochistic compurgations of Rainer Marie Fassbinder and the inscrutable weirdness of Werner Herzog—two filmmakers whose lives are as legendary as their work—we are not certain what to make of a director whose voice is modest to the point of meekness and whose greatest ambition, it would appear, is simply to make a good, strong, and above all normal film about "real people...

...Indeed, the distinctive now-ness of his postmodern esthetic, together with Béatrice Dalle's physical charm, comes quite close at times to justifying the price of admission...

...In the concluding scene he performs a noble act of euthanasia, smothering Betty with her pillow...

...His principal gift is for finding extremely seductive leading ladies and then exploiting their nakedness to the verge of obscenity, a formula he taps once again in his latest work, Betty Blue...

...Slowly and imperturbably, the camera moves in on a couple going at it with the most mammalian assiduity, while a reproduction of the Mona Lisa looks on from above—a typically pretentious touch...

...Stefan, meanwhile, proves so efficient at his work that he is promoted to the position of Julius' colleague...

...Nothing of the sort can be said for Jean-Jacques Beneix...

...Beneix's dialogue, adapted from a novel by Philippe Djian, is an unpersuasive admixture of obscenities and what might be termed the New Romance —clichés are okay so long as you admit they're clichés...

...Without revealing his own identity, Julius makes inquiries...

...He discovers the identity of her lover, a bohemian commercial artist named Stefan (Uwe Ochsenknecht), and learns that the man is looking for a roommate...

...But when the tests prove otherwise, she goes beserk —removing one of her eyes in the process—and winds up in the hospital...

...Occasionally he strikes his roommate without provocation, which the unsuspecting Stefan takes as a mark of insanity...

...Men opens in the office of an industrious Munich adman named Julius (Heiner Lauterbach...

...What is surprising is that Beneix's third film is so tedious to sit through...

...Betty is a waitress who has known Zorg only a week when she discovers in his trunk the manuscript of a novel he wrote a few years before...

...In contrast to the films of Fassbinder and Herzog, where cinematography is often called upon to conceal and to compensate for a disturbing lack of substance, Men is visually quite plain, almost to the point of drabness...

...After Diva and The Moon in the Gutter, it comes as no surprise that Betty Blue is less than an accomplished work of art...

...Having figured out that his wife cherishes her liaison mainly as a break from the square life she has always led, he will try to make a square out of her lover by arranging for his very own advertising firm to hire the artist...

...Convinced that he is a genius and thus deserving of a loftier existence, she burns his house down—a characteristically spontaneous gesture—and they escape to Paris, where they stay with a friend of hers...

...For a while Betty and Zorg do odd jobs at home and work in the restaurant of a fellow named Eddy, who also joins the household...

...The editing of a chase sequence, for instance, left me slightly confused...

...The scene then shifts to Julius' home via an effective and energetic montage that features shots of children snorkling in bathtubs and watching television...

...Enraged, the volatile Julius tries to pick a fight with Stefan, but their efforts at mutual intimidation dissolve in laughter, and the farce ends happily...

...Eventually Julius devises a plan...

...In order better to spy on his wife, Julius tells her he must leave town for a few months...

...Stefan sees Julius' wife at her house as a rule...

...Then a voiceover of Betty's lover Zorg (Jean-Hughes Anglades), whom we have just seen naked, begins to tell us about their rather offbeat affair...

...James Gardner, a new contributor to the NL, has previously written for Commentary and the New Criterion...

...In time a friendship develops between the two, made awkward only by Julius' flaring frustration at having constantly to guard his secret...

...The sense of cozy domesticity is suddenly breached, however, when Julius comes across evidence that his wife (Ulrike Kriener), whom he dearly loves (notwithstanding the secretary), has been unfaithful to him...

...Through force of habit we wait uneasily for some gimmick to come along and subvert the tone of sheer sanity that majestically declares itself from the very first frame of Men...

...This, of course, creates the central tension of the comedy...

...Soon another of Betty's violent outbursts results in a fork in the arm of a diner and an end to her career as a waitress, so she and Zorg decamp for a distant town to run a piano shop that used to belong to Eddy's deceased mother...