(courtesy IMDb)
Once upon a time, advertisers of food and cooking products loved the idea of stylising and propagating the ideal consumer of their products.
It was a way to make their products relatable and useful in an everyday product, to put a face to a somewhat faceless product, and while the U.S. had the ever-famous Betty Crocker (who endures to this day), the Swiss had, and still have Betty Bossi.
Fictional characters all, and in Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) we bear witness to the creation of Bossi, a housewife who asked Swiss women in a regular magazine style leaflet – “What Shall I Cook Today?”
Bossi was the creation of ad copywriter Emmi Creola-Maag (Sarah Spale), making her debut in 1956 via the leaflet but also via public appearances which started small but grew exponentially, with Creola-Maag becoming the inescapable public face of a woman who didn’t exist but whom many people assumed to be a flesh and blood person.
Such is the power and vivacity of Creola-Maag’s hugely relatable creation.
But it will surprise you not a jot to learn that both Bossi, and her creator, had to fight hard for legitimacy, to be heard above the clamour of misogynistic males who dominated advertising and claimed to know women better than they know themselves, and for Creola-Maag to have any say over how her creation was used.
Understandably Creola-Maag felt a sense of responsibility to fellow wives and mothers to get it right; she was, after all, married to the owner of a struggling family quarry form, Ernst (Martin Vischer) and the mother of three children, and knew the struggle of trying to get food on the table each night that her family would eat and whose creation wouldn’t kill her in the process.
Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) documents her sometimes Herculean fight to ensure that Bossi wasn’t simply a male-sculpted tool for selling products; she argued, and given her target market who could spell a con job a smile off as one public appearance showcased in the film beautifully illustrates, sensibly, and eventually successfully, that Bossi had to reflect the reality of the average Swiss housewife of the time.
So, when the male wunderkind creative director at the ad agency is successful in getting their client to agree to a TV show, Creola-Maag has to push furiously, and not without some setbacks to get Bossi to appear as a real woman, one with real world concerns and pressures, and not some Barbie Doll image of impossible male-envisaged domestic perfection.
While it is a cosy and retro delight in many respects, Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) is also a thoughtful and revealing exploration of what life was life for Swiss working mothers in the 1950s.
Bossi is initially meant to a low key affair but after a slow start, she becomes a country-wide phenomenon, and before she knows it, Creola-Maag is overwhelmed with running a testing kitchen, creating recipes with a team of hired real-world female cooks, and keeping the now ceaseless appetite for cooking advice from Switzerland’s housewives satisfied.
It’s not an easy road to travel and soon the cracks start appearing in Bossi’s creator’s marriage with her husband, who thankfully isn’t demonised but simply presented as a flawed man of his time who takes some time to realise he needs to support rather than oppose his wife, in her relationships with the women in the testing kitchen, especially Creola-Maag’s self-appointed manager, Italian restaurant cook, the irrepressibly feisty Maxi (Rabea Egg) and with her male colleagues who veer between combative (mostly) and supportive (occasionally) depending on how big a lift in sales Bossi is bringing to their major client’s sales.
The struggle is real, and much of Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) is devoted to Creola-Maag’s efforts to be a success at work, a supremely capable wife and mother at home and to have the two parts of her life work in unison and to not be cannibalised by the other.
Director Pierre Bonnard, working to reasonably buoyant script by André Küttel (which doesn’t always keep the focus where it should be) does an exemplary job of making Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) both a spirited piece of nostalgic biopic-ing while inserting a hefty amount of social commentary which is delivered without the temptation of going heavy-handed and simply becoming some sort of weary polemic.
Which is a good thing because while the creation of Bossi did not come without some serious strains and struggles, the character itself is warmly relatable, as far as this very non-Swiss reviewer can tell, and the film needed to show how much the women of Switzerland related to her, not just as a valuable source of recipes, but as someone who understood how overworked and under-appreciated they were.
Happily too for the emotional and social heft of Hello Betty (Hallo Betty), the film doesn’t shy away from some intense topics with domestic violence coming briefly into the spotlight as does the way Creola-Maag’s very real home life suffers without Ernst’s active support – by the end, he comes around and they become Team Creola and Ernst, a partnership that continues to the end of Ernst’s life in the ’90s – as it competes with the demands of her fictional creation who comes to take over her life.
The movie is a reasonably successful blend of thoughtful commentary and bright, retro nostalgia, with the presence of the former adding real emotional heft to the film and showing that enduring commercial struggles, while driving by strictly monetary concerns, often come from real world, very human places.
Hello Betty (Hallo Betty) is a delight to watch, offering burgeoning success and overwhelming struggle in equal measure, a love letter to a long-gone age which is sage and incisive enough to know that nostalgia can cover up a multitude of sins if you let it, and while the character is fun and relatable, she and her creators have to be the full some of their parts if this enduring symbol of commercial success is to be viewed in the full context of her creation and enduring appeal.