Jean-Jacques Beineix, ‘Cinema du Look’ Director, Dies at 75

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/arts/jean-jacques-beineix-dead.html

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Jean-Jacques Beineix, a French film director whose debut feature, the eye-popping, droll thriller “Diva,” was much acclaimed, especially outside of France, in the early 1980s and is often credited with starting a genre of French filmmaking known as the cinéma du look, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Paris. He was 75.

His family announced his death to Agence France-Presse, saying Mr. Beineix (pronounced Beh-nix) died after a long illness. Unifrance, the organization that promotes French film, issued a statement praising “his innovative, intensely visual, iconic cinema.”

In “Diva,” a fan surreptitiously tapes the performance of a renowned American soprano who has forbidden any recordings of her singing, setting off a chain of complications, including blackmail. One unusual aspect of the film was that the title character was played by a real-life opera singer, Wilhelmenia Fernandez. But the most unusual thing about the movie, for that time, was its look, full of color, references to other films and odd camera angles.

“Everything is seen through glass, in mirrors or as reflected from the surfaces of mud puddles,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1982, when the movie, which had opened in France the year before, played in New York. “If a scene isn’t shot from a low angle, it’s shot from a chandelier.”

Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was also struck by the visual bravura.

“It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky,” she wrote of the film, “but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.”

Its style was also sometimes called the new New Wave.

“In contrast to the old New Wavers,” Manohla Dargis of The Times explained in 2007, when a new print of “Diva” was shown at Film Forum, “who sought to interrogate the relationship between the real and the image, the new New Wavers seized on the unreality of cinema, underscoring its falsity, its theatricality, its surface.”

Luc Besson and Leos Carax were among the other directors often included in the genre, although that was not always a compliment; some critics faulted the films for emphasizing style over substance. Certainly Mr. Beineix’s subsequent movies — he made only a few more features — were greeted with mixed reviews at best.

The best known of those was “Betty Blue” (1986), a drama about an obsessive love affair. Sheila Benson, in The Los Angeles Times, named it one of the year’s 10 best.

“Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom,” she wrote.

But Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, said that the film “has a shallow, sunny prettiness and little more.” Its two leads, Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, spent quite a bit of the film unclothed.

“If either of them made it through the filming without catching a bad cold, it’s a miracle,” Ms. Maslin wrote.

Mr. Beineix accepted that his films might inspire ridicule as well as praise.

“That’s the risk you take,” he told The Gazette of Montreal in 2001. “But if an artist doesn’t take risks, what’s left? There has to be at least a minimum of provocation in art. That’s what films should do.”

Jean-Jacques Beineix was born on Oct. 8, 1946, in Paris. He loved movies from an early age, he said, but didn’t immediately pursue a career in filmmaking.

“I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2006. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinema altar” — a reference to the famed film magazine.

Instead, after earning a degree in philosophy and then studying medicine for several years, he took a leap of faith.

“I finally left the university when I was 24,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1982, “to take a job as an assistant film director at the lowest level. I brought coffee to people and enjoyed every minute of it because I didn’t have to study anymore.”

Throughout the 1970s, he worked his way up from second assistant director (including on the 1972 Jerry Lewis film “The Day the Clown Cried”) to first assistant director on films by Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and others. He gained valuable experience, but by the end of the 1970s was beginning to chafe at being an understudy.

“I was seeing things done one way, and I wanted them to be done differently,” he told The Tribune.

So he made “Diva,” though the film was not an instant success — largely, he thought, because it could not be easily pigeonholed. Critics in France didn’t like it, and promoters didn’t know how to promote it.

“Eventually, though, word of mouth turned everything around,” he said. And foreign audiences began discovering the movie. At the 1981 Festival of Festivals in Toronto it finished second in the audience voting for the event’s most popular film, behind “Chariots of Fire.”

His follow-up, “The Moon in the Gutter,” did not fare as well. It was booed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and flopped.

Mr. Beineix’s films after “Betty Blue” included “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” in 1992. The cast included the revered actor and singer Yves Montand, who died of a heart attack in November 1991 near the end of the filming. Mr. Beineix felt that people blamed him for the death. Shortly afterward, both his mother and his press agent, a close friend, also died. He didn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.

“It’s like you’ve been punched and punched and punched,” he told the film website Nitrate Online in 2001. “It built up, and suddenly I couldn’t make a picture.”

His return to filmmaking, with the comic thriller “Mortal Transfer” in 2001, was not successful.

Mr. Beineix’s survivors include his wife, Agnes, and a daughter, Frida.