Betty Fisher and Other Stories (2001)

the audience applauded

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

It looks like a promising movie, and it is to some extent, but I feel like it failed to show us the characters. The acting was good, but not entirely convincing at times. The movie as far as suspense and such is bad. No suspense, no action, no intensity. I didn't really understand some of the movie, and that may be why I didn't enjoy it.If you like intriguing story lines and (for the most part) a solid movie, this is for you. I won't give anything away, but the ending is a little disappointing. I rate this a 7/10.In case no one knows (but you should), this is a French movie.(My rating) R-Some sexual content/language, and brief violence

Brigitte Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain) is a successful writer, who adopted the pseudonym of Betty Fischer also as her real name. She is a single mother, and has just moved from New York to France with her son of about four years old to a house in the French suburb. Her mother Margot Fischer (Nicole Garcia) is a deranged woman, who lives in Spain and comes to France for some specific physical and mental exams. Betty has many traumas from her childhood due to the treatment spent by her mother. While talking with Margot in the kitchen, her son falls from the window of his second floor room and after a period in coma in a hospital, the child dies. Betty becomes very depressed and one day her mother arrives at home with a child of approximately same age as her dead grandson. She tells Betty that the boy is the son of a couple friend of her, who had traveled on vacation and asked her to take care of him. Some days later, Betty realizes through the news that her mother had indeed kidnapped the child. However, Betty is very affectionate to the boy. Meanwhile, many parallels stories happen with characters related to Betty and the child, being disclosed to the viewer. With a great screenplay and excellent interpretations, this low budget French movie is excellent. The story has many subplots, alternates drama and mystery, is amoral and not corny, the characters are very well developed and there are no clichés. I watched this movie in an American DVD called `Alias Betty', spoken in French with subtitles in English, and I highly recommended it. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): `Alias Betty' (American DVD)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)I am somehow reminded in the storyline of this film of the work of mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley; A Game for the Living, etc.) There is the same slightly genteel sense of mystery, realism and a women's point of view that characterizes Highsmith's work. In this case we have a young woman who loses her four-year-old son and then unexpectedly gains another. This intensely personal experience is set in the strata of contemporary French society. There are people in the projects, there is the underworld of petty criminals and prostitutes, and in contrast there are those who live in country homes beyond the suburbs. It is there that Betty, who is a novelist who has just published a best seller, lives.What director Claude Miller has done with this material is to make it dramatic and to tell the story through the medium of film. That may seem obvious, but how many film makers fail to understand the differences in media and end up with too much talk and too little use of the camera to good effect? Miller shows us commonplace scenes of the projects and contrasts them with the fine homes of the well-to-do. He shows us the long limbs and slightly gawky beauty of his star, Sandrine Kiberlain, who plays Betty, and he contrasts her to the fleshy woman of the streets and bars, Carole Novacki (Mathide Seigner) who is the mother of the boy that Betty gains. He also compares and contrasts the craziness of Betty's mother Margot (played with a fine fidelity by Nicole Garcia) with similar, more muted manifestations in Betty herself. There are interiors of luxury and grace, and those of people living temporary lives in high rise block apartments. One gets a sense of France in the twenty-first century adding texture and place to a woman's story that could happen in almost any city in the world.The opening scene shows Betty as a little girl on a train with her mother. We are told that her mother is suffering from some compulsive mental illness. We see her stab her daughter in the hand. And then we are fast-forwarded to the present and Betty is with her son Joseph, a scar on her hand, without a husband, going to her house in the countryside. Mother re-enters and we see that she is indeed a mental case, absurdity self-consumed and insensitive. When the boy falls out of a window and dies from the brain damage, Betty is in something close to catatonic shock, but her mother thinks only of her own welfare and seems indifferent to anything else.And then comes the twist.I won't describe what Margo does now because it is so interesting to see it unfold. At any rate, Betty is forced to come out of her depression and embrace new love and new responsibilities and to indeed commit a most criminal act, that of running away with another's child. And yet somehow we are made to feel--indeed the events of the plot compels us to feel--that she does the right thing in spite of her initial feelings and in spite of what would normally be right. Later on in the film there is another nice twist when the father of the dead boy returns and wants his share of Betty's success and fortune.What I think many viewers will appreciate here is that the players look and act like real people, not like people from central casting. Alex Chatrian plays the second little boy and he is a charmer, and beautifully directed by Miller. Kiberlain's laconic and wistful portrayal of a woman with so many choices won her Best Actress awards at the Montreal and Chicago film festivals. She has the kind of beauty that grows on you, yet is not glamorous or glittery, but when she smiles, as she so seldom does in this movie, she lights up the whole screen. And Seigner looks like a common woman, not like a Hollywood star dressed up like a prostitute.The men are also interesting and also very real. Luck Mervil, who plays Carole's boyfriend, is restrained like a volcano that one knows will eventually go off; and Stephane Freiss, who plays the father of the dead boy, and Edouard Baer who plays a scheming lower-class gigolo, are two very real varieties of men who prey on women.The ending is witty and satisfying, and I can tell that Claude Miller has seen Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) starring Sterling Hayden since part of this scene recalls the finale in that American film noir with the money flying out of a suitcase during a chase scene at an airport. Or perhaps that bit is from Rendell's novel (which I haven't read) and it is she who recalls Kubrick's film.This is a thriller that manages to also be an engaging chick flick, if you will, a commingling of character and story that is in the best tradition of film making, and one of the best films I've seen in months.

This film really questions the sense of the "societally approved" justice and morality by an intriguing inquiry into the theme of motherhood. And it leaves you strained, confused and amused ! The film beautifully combines a tragedy with absurdity, and shows a witty balance of refrained emotion and black humor.The plot is made of a main story that could be summarized as a tragedy, which will have a domino effect, hence the different sub-plots, that ultimately merge in an unexpected ending, which then reflects a new light back upon the rest of the movie ! That's where the main problem of the film is, the coincidences at the end look a bit far-fetched and over-the-top but are still believable. Otherwise the directing is great and this films looks like a suspense thriller, a French one however, which means a lot of talk at the beginning. But don't be put off, it's highly rewarding.I could not commend enough how the acting here is excellent and realistic. The director paints a bunch of dysfunctional characters that all have something to hide. A sharp look at our modern society.to sum up : an intriguing suspense film that questions the society's self-righteousness (and ours) (8 out of 10)