Betty Fisher and Other Stories (2001)

Admirable film.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The English title on the Region 2 release does a much better job of luring us into this stylish French thriller, part psychological study and part ensemble suspense story. Betty Fisher and Other Stories tells us about Brigitte Fisher (Betty is her nom de plume), a young woman who has written a successful novel. In New York she married briefly, had a child and has return to Paris. She had an unpleasant childhood with a mother who at times would become irrationally angry. Brigitte's marriage lasted six months. Now her son is four years old and her mother has unexpectedly arrived for medical "treatments." Days later, Brigitte's son falls from a second floor window and dies. Brigitte (Sandrine Kiberlain) is distraught and depressed. Her mother takes steps to fix that...by stealing a four-year-old child from a lower-class neighborhood and bringing the boy home for her daughter. Betty at first rejects the child but then slowly becomes attached. And we learn about the child's real mother, Carole Novacki, a surly young barmaid, shoplifter and part-time prostitute. There's Carole's live-in boy friend, Francoise, a laborer from Africa; Milo, the bartender with a short fuse where she works; Alex, the hustler, long-time friend and occasional bed-mate of Carole; there's Eduard, Brigitte's former husband who shows up and sees her now as a literary bread ticket. There is a whole cast of characters, including the police who are searching for the stolen boy. Their stories swirl around Brigitte's story, sometime overlapping, sometimes just glancing by. The stories come together at Orly Air Port in a violent confrontation which leaves these people and their stories getting what they deserve. Which means some die, some flee and some get on an airplane for Singapore. The director, Claude Miller, does two things very well. He not only involves us with all these stories, he gives them all an overlay of uneasy tension. Especially with Brigitte, her mother and the stolen boy, there is an edgy dread that quickly establishes itself. It eases up only when we realize the boy will survive, but there still is the question of what will happen to him. Miller also gives us some strong characters to get involved with, even if we don't like them too much. There's no flashy acting moments, just the steady building of information about these people, which Miller lets us discover for ourselves. The actors, in my view, all do fine jobs. Sandrine Kiberlain carries the movie and she handles her character with depth and skill. Nicole Garcia, who plays Brigitte's mother, makes us nervous whenever we see her. Just how unstable is Margot Fisher? The story, by the way, is from one of Ruth Rendell's psychological thrillers. This is a movie which keeps something of a cool distance from the many goings on. I don't think this is a fault. It helps us examine Brigitte's evolving feelings and helps us make choices about the characters. I'd be surprised if any viewer doesn't finally agree with Brigitte's choice.

"Alias Betty" promises more than it delivers. The early scenes, in introducing us to two convincing, lifelike characters, suggest French film at its best--and one just wants to savor the building drama. However, as soon as plot elements begin to insert themselves--a la Hollywood--character development gets circumscribed. Betty Fisher shrinks in stature and in interest as the film progresses, Margot becomes a bit tiresome and disappears, and Carole grows more deviant and is killed off. In other words, all three of these modern mothers are initially more, and are capable of more, than who they become.One never gets the impression that the Betty Fisher we first know---so original in looks, physicality, and response--is going to be a kind of child sop mother. Yes, she does have a fatherless son, and she is determined to do more by him than her neuro-mental mother did by her, but this son is hardly his mother's keeper. Her care for him is not uncompromising--the accident should be proof enough of that--nor is her deep depression over his death anything but understandable, given her personal history. Thus she convincingly maintains this stance with Joe-2, her responses to him being that of any career woman similarly positioned, occasionally sympathetic but generally finding the kid burdensome. But soon the plot starts to get inside her head and wreck havoc with her well based and centered identity. New plot characters begin to proliferate. Maternal clichés start to predominate (teddy bears, Christmas scenes, cute outdoors stuff). Betty the genuine novelist (at least in my mind, and Dr. Francois') becomes the tepid best seller--the kind which gives credence to her hubby's mockery. She is now simply subject to the cues of the plot , and is, as such, less adult, less interesting, less herself, and simply another Alex Basato, who is in the plot (he gets about as much time as she does by this point in the film), but redundant as a character. Margot, Betty's mom, is also loses fluency. Her mighty early notes grow false as her role diminishes. Yes, she can be shrill and perhaps a bit over the top, but she's clearly a sympathetic character, one we want to be part of the dramatic action and its outcome. Again, she descends from being loud, strong, a bigger than life on screen presence who's Betty's equal to being a plot messenger. She delivers Joe-2, and like her daughter, seems sacrificed to him. But Carole, Joe-2's mother, is not lessened by this little rascal--other plot aspects diminish her. But less so, because she emerges later in the film and is already enmeshed in plot, so can only descend less from an intrinsic identity. What Carole begins with is a wide sensual range coupled with an equally broad toughness which strangely seems to attract an array of male types. But her convincing sense of control, which if nothing else, is a foil to the new child-ridden Betty, quickly descends or is absorbed by an imposed role and plot which makes her little more than a warn sex object. The only sort of real character she gets to interact with, apart from her boyfriend, is her bar-tender boss---and he kills her.

This quietly compelling entry from French director Claude Miller was strangely marketed to American international cinema enthusiasts as an edge of your seat thriller. Based on the plot synopsis (best-selling novelist loses son to tragic accident, then crazy mother kidnaps "replacement son" for grieving daughter, then kidnapped boy's unpredictable mother and criminal friends seek to get boy back) I thought this was going to be good, and weird. Instead it was great, and weird, but not the kind of weird I was suspecting. Despite plenty of opportunity to do so, Miller never exploits or sensationalizes any of the intertwining tales of Parisian misfits begotten to misfortune both accidental and of their own making. He takes a meditative, and at times cold, though ultimately intimate look at human relations and diverging theories on what it means to be a mother. The "thrills" emerge from the fact that you never know what these interesting characters are going to do next. Miller pulls no punches. There's no pounding music score, fancy camera tricks, or melodramatic theatrics. The performances are as nuanced and natural as the direction. This is a perfect remedy for those seeking respite from Hollywood thrillers.

Deftly, director Claude Miller and his excellent cast turn out a fairly fast-paced set of scenes of the lives of interconnected people faced with a crescendo of escalating trouble. With the English title of "Alias Betty," not an adequate translation from the French, the neighborhoods of Paris witness tragic loss, wistful grasping for hope and ludicrous scheming for ill-gotten gain.Sandrine Fisher is "Betty," an author with a very successful (apparently first) novel about her life and marriage during a four-year sojourn in New York City. Returning to a just bought beautiful house in the outer Parisian suburbs, Betty - who makes it clear she's had it with New York's claustrophobic A-list social life - just wants peace and quiet for herself and her young son, Joseph. Immediately arrives her wacky mother, "Margot" (played very well by Nicole Garcia), in town for medical tests that she won't trust doctors to perform in Spain where she and her husband settled.Mother-daughter conflict? Sure. Ranging back to Betty's youth? Yep. Familiar? Of course. Sandrine is very believable as a daughter with a vivid and deeply rooted love/hate relationship with mom. Mom may be worried about her health and want extensive medical tests but she's the kind of gal who'll outlive all the people she drives nuts. And she IS nuts too.Hardly settled into her home, Betty gets hit with the unspeakable tragedy of an accident claiming her young son's life. If that isn't bad enough (and is anything worse than the loss of a child?), Margot thoughtfully picks up little Jose for Betty as a "replacement" for her lost boy. "Picks up?" Right, as in kidnapping. Jose is the child of a complex and wounded character, "Carole," (Mathilde Seigner), a woman battered as a child and available to as many men in a week as time will allow. Who is Jose's father is a big question mark and dominating concern for some but not for Carole who seems to write off the result of her prostitution as an inconvenience. Carole hovers between likability and repulsiveness. Mathilde Seigner invests her complex role with rapidly shifting emotions.Anything more would constitute spoilers. Miller has given a fresh coat to the frequent cinema theme of casual interactions through the interconnectedness of the characters' lives as revealed by sharply etched encounters. Sandrine Kiberlain, a thin woman, whose shoulders carry the weight of the story, delivers a remarkably effective and nuanced performance.The resolution is alternately amusing and messy but, overall, believable. A very good film.7/10.