"Beverly Hills Bordello"

Renee Townsend

All clips (zipped .avis), caps, and comments by ICMS

 Today I present you clips and vidcaps of Julie Delpy in "La Passion Béatrice" (1987). They come from the Spanish region 2 DVD, as far as I know the only available edition of this Bertrand Tavernier movie. While the image is a very good anamorphic widescreen transfer, especially the French audio leaves somewhat to be desired. For those thinking of acquiring this DVD, let me warn you that it is only in French or Spanish with optioal Spanish subtitles. Nada inglés, I'm afraid.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Now about the movie. To begin with it is 127 minutes long, with the emphasis on long. Only after 12 seconds I already suspected that I would be in for a tough ride when this opening message appeared. I'll translate for your convenience: "La Passion Béatrice is a film of emotion rather than a psychological oeuvre. Its characters are only guided by their interior pulsations. Their universe is both vaste and fierce, haunted by the powers of the Hereafter, a univers where the Sacred goes side by side with Barbary. They are naked beings, possessed, too shaken by the Forces of Good and Evil to see gray-shades, the clairs-obscurs. They are wild children. They are what we still are at night, in our dreams. They are our unconscious(ness)."

Are you getting the picture here? In a nutshell the story deals with Beatrice de Cortemart (Julie Delpy), a gentle, God-fearing but naive noblewoman, and her father François (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) against the backdrop of the battle of Crécy (1346) in which her dad and her brother are taken captive by the English. Four years later they are finally allowed to return home after Bea had to sell practically everything they owned except the castle to pay for their ransom. Now dad was already a pain in the arse before he left, upon his return he has become even worse, much worse. In fact he might be the devil reincarnated.

He humiliates his son, who really is a wimp, in public several times. He thinks his daughter is his personal possession with whom he can and does have his way, thereby deflowering her in the process. He loots and kills mercily in the area around his castle and seems haunted by something. And before I forget, he is also THE misogynist of all misogynists. I'll give just one example. Near the end of the movie he says to someone that he doesn't believe in the Holy Trinity because he can't have faith in a god that lowers himself to be born out of a female !!! Remember, those are his words, not mine.

The main reason why I found this to be a very long watch is the fact that all characters are one-dimensional and practically don't evolve. Furthermore you expect some kind of explanation for all this cruel behavior, but none is given, as the beginning indicates. All this makes that there isn't really a storyline and to me the film looked more like a succession of "tableaux vivants" to stay with the painting terms from the movie's introduction. This of course implies some nice photography, but that alone is not enough to make a comfartable 127 minutes watch. The dialogues are merely there to add somewhat to the imagery and are often not really related to the story. Furthermore the father character is so despickable that it doesn't allow for a nice viewing and I sure was glad to see the end credits.

There is a bit of relief after 56 minutes when a young 18 year old Julie Delpy makes her first shy nude appearance which you can see in clip 1. However the passage was so dark that my divx converter couldn't determine the exact image size, but the goodies are there although you don't see much. The other clips are perfectly fine though and you can see Julie Delpy in all her glory. Clips 2 and 3 happen just after her father has raped his up-till-then-virginal daughter. In clip 4 dad wants to marry his daughter and he comes in with some fabric for the bridal gown. In clip 5 the bridal gown is finished and he brings it to Bea in the bath tub to try it on.

Let me put your minds to ease. Béatrice won't end up married to her father. She does evolve a little bit at the very end, takes matters into her own hands and solves the problem with dad once and for all. Finally.

As an extra there's still a sixth clip of French actress and since also director Isabelle Nanty, who shows her right breast. The guy she's breast-feeding is the wimpish brother of Béatrice, Arnaud, as much of a dreamer as his sister.

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Here's the star, Carre Otis