From Betty Blue to ShortCuts

1. From Betty Blue to ShortCuts|A birthday cake is seldom an unambiguous cause for celebration in the movies Those to whom Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue (1986) represented a seminal (ahem) crossover between the private consumption of soft porn and the public appreciation of glossy arthouse cinema may be jarred to note that the film is now close to three decades old. The shadow it casts is long, for a work of variable critical reputation whose director's international star has waned; and it still stands as one of the most risque films to be nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar. This year's pathologically breast-aware awards host Seth Macfarlane would have blown a fuse. But 'nearly 30, surely not' isn't the only surprising birthday associated with Betty Blue (known in France by the title of Philippe Djian's source novel, 37° du matin). When the sexually and temperamentally volatile beauty Betty, played by Beatrice Dalle, celebrates her birthday part-way through the film, it transpires that the woman we've been watching in various states of undress and coitus is a teenager. Betty is just turning 20. Dalle was a shade older, around 21; her co- star Jean-Hugues Anglade a decade older. We learn her age when Anglade's character Zorg takes her to see a piece of land that he's bought her, and presents her with a cake produced from the boot of his car. The cake is a childlike offering to a woman not long out of childhood whose appeal is unsettlingly distributed between infantile and erotic attributes. And its candles have miraculously, hazardously remained lit on the journey — reflecting the fires that Betty sometimes lights when she's upset, and all the burning passion that her tantrums and their relentless coupling can't extinguish. Her birthday is, however, the beginning of the end for Betty — if indeed the content of the whole film isn't basically her accelerated decline from sexual usefulness. Apparently transitioning directly from teenagerhood to imprisonment by biological clock (the process does seem a touch less abrupt in Beineix's sprawling director's cut than in the trim original), she soon becomes irredeemably enslaved by her catastrophic premenstrual syndrome and her desire to have a child. One she's gone mad enough to destroy her own looks, Zorg takes an executive decision to put her out of her misery — her light proving a little easier to extinguish than the candles on her cake. (Which, incidentally, she never gets to eat: it falls to the ground in the more pressing pursuit of an embrace.) A more resilient and certainly more vengeful form of female madness features in Park Chanwook's new film Stoker, the title sequence of which shows the candles on r8-year-

2. old India's birthday cake snuffed out by what appears to be less a cake dome than a bell jar (a symbol, to Sylvia Plath, of oppression and entrapment, but also of defiant self-separation). India (Mia Wasikowska), with her clear wardrobe debt to Balthus's pubescent minxes, is also a girl and a woman at once. But unlike Betty, she has an appetite for food and a preference for solo sexual gratification (and unlike Betty, she survives the film). The birthday cake stands, of course, for celebration, but also for the impermanence and perishability of that celebration, and through it the irretrievable passing of a life stage. It's deployed with unforgettable poignancy in the segment of Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) based on the Raymond Carver story 'A Small, Good Thing'. Parents Howard (Bruce Davison) and Ann (Andie MacDowell) face the wrath of Lyle Lovett's short-fused baker when they fail to collect their son Casey's birthday cake, the boy having been killed in a hit-and-run. Through the wrangle that follows, the cake itself stands as an innocent object of the baker's disproportionate wrath, and a sickly reminder of Casey's stalled future. Cake as an emblem of unwholesome excess features as an indication of a Queen's naive profligacy in zoo6's Marie Antoinette (though Sofia Coppola has her protagonist deny she ever exhorted the starving to live on it), and of a mother's deranged overprovision for her fracturing family in Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy (1997). Consuming, baking or rejecting cake: all perhaps preferable to being placed inside one as a birthday surprise — a logical step, perhaps, from the association of sexually available women with dessert ('tart' dates to the late 19th century, 'cheesecake' to the 1930s; I recall as a child, a little more recently, being thoroughly befuddled by Barry Norman commenting that in some 8os film or other Michelle Pfeiffer looked "as if you could eat her with a spoon"). The girl-in-cake trope exposes Debbie Reynolds's high-minded Kathy as a mere showgirl in Singin' in the Rain (1951); provides a titillating break in the relentless male-on-male violence of Under Siege (1992); and introduces characters played by Jack Lemmon to a multiple murder in Some Like It Hot (1959) and a troublesome spouse (Virna Lisi) in How to Murder Your Wife (1965). The somewhat troubling undercurrents of the idea — woman associated directly with confection, sex with consumption thereof — are given full and grisly flight in Addams Family Values (1993), in which a cake presented to Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) produces an ominous trace of smoke in place of the expected dollybird. "Lurch," Gomez admonishes his butler, "was she in there before you baked?" Bombshell to burnout before the birthday party's even kicked off: that's got to be the neatest possible distillation of the brief Betty Blue life cycle. By : http://www.watchonline.red