A blue poster, and a morning of 37.2

The notes open lightly, with a poster many people have met on a bar wall: a blue ground, and a woman whose expression is hard to fix. The poster is familiar, they write, but surprisingly few have actually seen the film through. It is a French picture released in 1988 and shown in Korea, in 2000, in an uncut print. Two people, in this telling, love each other without condition.

The original title, they write, is morning 37.2 — 37.2 Le Matin. That figure may name the most favourable temperature at climax, or a fertile-body temperature; keeping that heat every morning can also look like living too hot for the world. The notes keep all three readings in play, and do not settle on only one. Against the couple’s passionate love, the images are mostly a depressing blue, like the Korean release title itself.

A painter in a bungalow, and a love they call absolute

Zorg, in this account, is a thirty-year-old aspiring writer, living as a house painter in a beach bungalow, when Betty appears suddenly before him. She is intense, they write, sensual and wild in the notes’ wording, and as unpredictable as that intensity suggests. Her love for Zorg is absolute. Other than the man who, in her eyes, truly loved and understood her, she cannot form a close bond with any other man; men, to her, are after a physical relation only.

On some days she looks as if she has the whole world, lively and bright; on others she sinks into emptiness and a depression that leaves her vacant. She often judges a situation poorly, and acts as if reason had slipped. Those swings stay as the notes describe them.

A fork, a comb, a slammed door, and a class’s measure

When anger breaks, they write, she can look so stark and cruel that ‘mad’ is almost the only word left. She verbally abuses an employer and sets a house on fire; she stabs a difficult customer’s arm with a fork; convinced that Zorg will be a genius novelist, she finds the publishing clerk who rejected his novel as poor and scratches that face with a comb. The same anger is also turned on Zorg. He is in the study, irritated by the television she has put on in the living room, and shuts the door, breathing hard; she comes in for popcorn, then slams the door as she leaves.

The assignment’s work is to read those impulsive and extreme acts from the side of psychopathology — abnormal psychology — and to watch how a passion the notes call absolute begins to give way. It does not, in this telling, attach a later official diagnosis to her name. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student abnormal-psychology reading of the 1988 French film Betty Blue 37.2, with the original title’s three readings and Betty’s impulsive acts left as the notes record them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026