I am surprised, and a little dismayed, at how cold and passionless this adaptation of a Simenon book is. I haven't read Betty, but those works of Simenon I am familiar with don't make me reach for the thermostat the way Chabrol's film does. La veuve Couderc, Maigret et l'affaire St-Fiacre, Monsieur Hire, to name just three, have an engagement with life that is sorely lacking in this trifle. Why tell the story in fragmented style, à la Memento or Amores perros, when a straightforward sequential narration would do fine? Why use a character just to describe Betty's emotional states when we can guess at these from the visual evidence? Marie Trintignant conveys Betty's vapid, eager-to-please behaviour very well. Booze does blunt the emotions, increase or decrease aggression, make one sexually irresponsible just as we see on screen. Stéphane Audran as Laure drinks almost as much as Betty, but cannot forget she has feelings, is capable of compassion. Chabrol concentrates on satirizing the bourgeois family to the exclusion of practically everything else in the story.

Based on the novel by Georges Simenon, Betty is, well, about Betty (Marie Trintignant),a young alcoholic woman whose affairs cause her to be removed from her family and not allowed to see her two children. One night in a bar, she meets Laure (Stéphane Audran),who takes her in, gives her a luxury hotel room and the opportunity to tell her story within a series of flashbacks.

The last film that director Claude Chabrol and his former spouse Stéphane Audran (Audran was also married to the father of her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant) made together, it features a character deprived of the love of her husband, used as a womb to create children for a rich family and left to only feel through alcohol and sex. But behind her eyes and those bangs, is she trouble for anyone she comes into contact with?

Is this a realistic story of life? A horror movie without the supernatural? A formless movie with no plot instigated within a 1960s conversation between Simenon and Chabrol? All of those things and more? Watch and see.

A drunken self-destructive woman called Betty (Marie Trintignant) wanders through bars and meets a man that drives her to a restaurant outside Paris called Le Trou (The Hole). She meets the middle-aged alcoholic Laure (Stéphane Audran) from Lyon, who is the lover of the Le Trou´s owner Mario (Jean-François Garreaud). Laure decides to take care of Betty and brings her to the room next-door in her hotel. Along the days, Betty tells the story of her bourgeois life and her unhappy marriage to Laure and also recalls moments of her promiscuous life.

"Betty" is a depressing and dark film by Claude Chabrol with the non-linear and fragmented story of a promiscuous and self-destructive woman called Betty. Her non-likable character is never attractive to the viewer that does not care to what happens or has happened to her. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Betty - Uma Mulher sem Passado" ("Betty - A Woman Without Past")