Jean-Jacques Beineix died on Thursday at the age of 75, his brother Jean-Claude announced on Friday. He died at his home in Paris, “following a long illness”.
The director was one of the big names in “cinema du look”, this movement of the Seventh French art of the 1980s where aesthetics prevailed over naturalism. Revealed by the movie Diva in 1981, he achieved wider notoriety in 1986 with 37°2 in the morning, a cult feature film adapted from the novel by Philippe Djian.
Born in October 1946 in the capital, Jean-Jacques Beineix began his career as assistant director to Jean Becker on the series The Holy Darlings in 1970. Diva, his first feature film as a director is a musical thriller featuring the relationship between a postman and a soprano. Bright colors, pop art inspirations, slick image… The work already shows aesthetic choices that will make the mark of the filmmaker – some critics then spoke, pejoratively, of “advertising” aesthetics.
The “37°2” box
His second film, The Moon in the Gutter, shot at Cinecittà, the famous Roman film studios, was in competition for the 1983 Palme d’Or, but, exhausted on the Croisette, it ended in public failure.
It’s with 37°2 in the morning in 1986 he had his greatest success. That year, more than 3.6 million people went to see the burning and tragic love story between Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle, a real revelation.
However, the public did not attend his next three films – the last of his filmography – Roselyne and the lions, IP5: The island of pachyderms and Deadly transfer, released in 1989, 1992 and 2001 respectively.
“A big slap in the face”
Jean-Jacques Beineix had stopped the cinema in the early 2000s. “At the same time, I managed a feat and at the same time I took a big slap in the face. Well, that’s been it all the time, my life in the cinema, “he summed up to Franceinfo in 2020, explaining that the very poor reception in Cannes of The Moon in the Gutter was an “injury”: “What made me stop today, it started there. »
If he has made a few forays into documentaries (“The children of Romania”, “Place Clichy without complexes” …) under the banner of his production company, Cargos Films, over the past twenty years, he has mainly turned to writing. In 2006, he delivered his autobiography, The Shipyards of Glory: Memoirs, after writing both volumes of the comic The Case of the Century. Two years ago, Michel Lafon published his first (and only) novel, Toboggan. The story of “the fall of a character who has lost faith in humanity”.