BETTY BLUE: 37°2 LE MATIN: Women In Film Fest @ FOMO Cinema Tbilisi
Friday 3. April at 18:30 - 20:30
FOMO Secret Cinema, Tbilisi
Jean-Jacques Beineix | 1986 | France | 1h59m | French language with English subtitles
This is film #17 in FOMO’s extended Women in Film Week, a program built around female performance, female subjectivity, and the many ways women’s stories are written, performed, directed, and brought to life on screen.
Jean-Jacques Beineix’s BETTY BLUE begins as a love story between two drifters living close to the edge of ordinary society. Zorg paints beach bungalows for a living and writes in notebooks no one has read. Then Betty arrives, and with her comes sex, chaos, devotion, and a kind of total belief in his talent that begins to reshape both of their lives. What starts in heat and play gradually becomes harder to hold together, as Betty’s volatility turns from exhilarating to frightening and the film shifts from romantic abandon into breakdown.
Beineix met Dalle while she was working as a model in Paris, and decided to cast her as the lead despite her having no prior acting experience. And it's her performance that the film still lands with such force. She's magnetic from the very start, but Beineix doesn't leave her as an erotic fantasy or a glamorous problem. He keeps showing the damage done when the people around her refuse to see what's happening in front of them.
Critics have long placed BETTY BLUE at the centre of the "cinéma du look", a strand of 1980s French cinema associated with directors like Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax. These films are marked by saturated colour, stylised lighting, strong visual design, and a focus on mood, sensation, and youth culture over traditional realism. In BETTY BLUE, that heightened visual surface sits in tension with the emotional collapse unfolding underneath it.
WHY IT’S INCLUDED IN THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM: I'm showing BETTY BLUE because it gives us one of the most unforgettable female performances in the whole program. It also sits at an uneasy crossroads between desire, projection, mental illness, and the male fantasy of the “difficult” woman. That tension is exactly what makes it worth wrestling with in a week like this.
LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.
HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter the Bazari via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left as soon as you enter next to the karaoke booth. FOMO is one flight up. Video instructions here: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235
T&Cs: Guests must enter the Bazari by 23:00 to gain access to the FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar. If the Atoneli St entrance is locked you can get in via the side entrance on Sulkhanishvil St between 21:00 and 23:00. We close at 02:00 each evening. No refunds are issued unless we cancel the screening ourselves.
FOMO Secret Cinema • Bazari Orbeliani stairwell, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
