BETTY (Claude Chabrol, 1992)

Dark, enigmatic, elusive, writer-director Claude Chabrol’s Betty, from Georges Simenon, keeps dipping into Betty’s past because her present is so incapable of yielding up anything about her. The film’s mosaic of time even includes repetitions of the key moment of her life, when Betty signs away all rights to her two children after being caught en flagrante by her husband, Guy. But, in truth, the past scarcely resolves anything about this 28-year-old woman who drinks to excess and compulsively sleeps around—although the film hints that her personality at the last may have achieved stability at the expense of Laure (Stéphane Audran, magnificent), the soul who rescued her from the depths of despair and whom Betty betrays, shattering her. Outcomes are blunt and irrevocable; the human journeys that lead there, mysterious.
     Because the film gets so often intermittently trapped into tiny boxes of the past, it hardly moves ahead at all. Perhaps it makes no more progress than any individual’s actual life.
     This is one of Chabrol’s most tragic, most haunting films. As witnesses, we while watching it become bits and pieces of Betty’s past trapped in tiny boxes of time.

DO BIGHA ZAMEEN (Bimal Roy, 1953)

Conjoining portrayals of both rural and urban poverty, Bimal Roy’s Two Acres of Land revolves around Shambhu Maheto, a West Bengali farmer whose refusal to sign away his bit of land frustrates the attempt of the local zamindar to have a factory built that will energize the area with progress, providing jobs, running water, electricity. This feudal lord, Thakur Harnam Singh, calls in a loan he has made to Shambhu in order to pressure his compliance, but the courts give Shambhu three months in which to pay off the debt. Shambhu takes his young son, Kanhaiya, with him to Calcutta, where they both find work, Shambhu as a rickshaw man and Kanhaiya as a street shoeshiner who, deprived of his post, turns to theft. When wife and mother Parveti (“Paro”), who has worked as a laborer back home, joins husband and son, a street accident requires that the money they all have accumulated be spent on saving her life. What difference? When they return home, the factory is up and belching smoke.
     The opening is cunning. The camera shows parched land and a barren, skeletal tree; a drought has lasted two years. But Roy almost immediately proceeds to the point of relief: rain. This rapid sequence suggests that the drought, a test of families, existed precisely to end; one infers a benign universe. This impression is ironically overturned by contrary evidence: the feudalism politically in place; Shambhu’s lack of self-determination; Kanhaiya’s susceptibility to moral error despite his upbringing; above all, the overwhelming need for money matched by a paucity of means for making it.
     The influence of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) is apparent; alas, this includes De Sica’s sentimental inclination but not his gift for either social analysis or visual poetry. Visually, the Hindi film is best at beginning and end. Balraj Sahni’s exaggerated lead performance as Shambhu falls considerably short of Lamberto Maggiorani’s bone-deep one as Antonio in Bicycle Thieves.

SMALL CHANGE (François Truffaut, 1976)

L’argent de poche (literally, Pocket Money) is François Truffaut’s attempt at “a Chabrol,” but without adultery or murder. Working from his and Suzanne Schiffman’s episodic script, Truffaut has brought his crew into a provincial town, in this case, Thiers, and mixed professional actors, mostly adults, and nonprofessionals, mostly the town’s own kids. It is an idealized film, for the most part a behavioral comedy focusing on the very young, but a dark vein touches (successfully) on serious child abuse.
     The whole thing has an air of contrivance; the schoolroom passages especially seem rigged, and stretches of the film are tedious. Amusing moments must suffice when the viewer craves hilarity.
     All in all, the film is amiable and charming, showing how dearly loved and resilient children are. The abused boy, Julien, himself becomes the recipient of caring community intervention once bruises and burns are discovered on his body during a routine physical exam. This leads to schoolteacher Richet’s impassioned speech, perhaps aiming at planting in his pupils’ heads a seed of political consciousness, in which he draws a connection between political inattention to children’s needs and the absence of children’s suffrage.
     Earlier, Richet shared with his pupils his joy over the birth of his first child—one of the film’s most compelling aspects.
     But it is the kids themselves we care about most. For instance, Little Grégory, is a toddler whom we enjoy watching toddle—or hammering spaghetti on a neighbor’s apartment floor. Truffaut applies a Hitchcockian camera-jump as the two-year-old mounts the ten-floors-up balcony rail in pursuit of his pet cat, and our hearts jump, too. “I went boom!” Grégory exclaims, uninjured, after falling to the ground below, causing his mother to faint. Twelve-year-old Patrick cheerfully shops for his paraplegic single father, but he silently envies boys who benefit from a mother’s kiss or caress. Indeed, with one friend’s mother he is infatuated, even buying her roses, but her response that Patrick should thank his father for her—is she uncomprehending or being tactful?—signals his shift in interest to girls, culminating at summer camp with a first kiss. And there’s Julien, who is barred from the abandoned shack where he and his family are holed up because he has arrived home late from school, who scavenges food to eat, who steals, who sleeps outside the school gate. Truffaut introduces this updated “wild child” with a slow, upscaling camera that makes the boy seem very tall. When the camera stops on Julien’s face, the bit of sky at the top of the frame deflates the gigantic impression; a long-shot of Julien and an adult then punctures it completely, exposing Julien as small, slight, defenseless, vulnerable.
     This is not one of Truffaut’s better films. On the other hand, it is way better than The Mississippi Mermaid (1969) or Day for Night (1973).