This came up as a stray comment on some other post, but HBO’s In Treatment is a fine, fine show — the premise is that each season (I’m just about done with Season 1, and 2 is on now) follows one therapist (the excellent Gabriel Byrne) week by week in his sessions with four different patients (and in his own session with his therapist, the quite good Dianne Wiest). Listen, it’s therapy — if you find the psychoanalytic tedious, then the show may grate, as it can be a bit schematic in the long-run structure of these separate treatments’ story arcs. But the acting, oh lord, the moment-by-moment fascination and allure of such great conversation, such subtle and sharp attention to how people LISTEN to one another… it’s great. And we just watched an episode, late in season 1, where the father of one of Byrne’s patients comes in, and it is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. Glynn Turman plays the father, and some of us will recall him as The Wire‘s first outsized corrupt fox of a mayor Royce…. It would be impossible, I suppose, to just rent disc 8 and watch this show, but if you commit to the season, which is itself worth the time, this episode will astound you.

Back in the bad ol’ early ‘eighties, as I slowly began sampling further afield than the big-Hollywood classics frequently shown on basic-cable superstations and the crazed range of sleazy D-movies sprinkled in between the new releases at the local video shop, the first art-house theater opened in Rochester. Taken by an ambitious French teacher to see Le Dernier Combat–ironically, a film with almost no spoken dialogue, somewhat defeating the purpose the teacher had in mind–I was taken by the movie posters and started going back. Somewhere in there I saw Betty Blue.

Betty wasn’t the first French film I saw–I think my friends and I had done the new enthusiasts’ obligatory scouting over Truffaut and Godard, what little we could find–but it was the first to blow me away, one of the first films I saw that I felt confident engaging with as a filmlover, and like that great band no one knows or that obscure novelist who is yours and yours alone, I felt like Beineix’s crazed, lush, outsized Tragic comic Romance was *mine* in a way that those other French auteurs’ work hadn’t been.

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