The advertising lettering is massive on the wall, an emphatic request, almost threatening: “Try another world”. The man to whom it is addressed in “The Moon in the Gosse”, 1983, is the very young Gérard Depardieu, who is lounging around in armchairs, frighteningly lethargic, in a dark backyard in the port of Marseilles, and whom not even his girlfriend can provoke anymore. He mourns the loss of another woman, his sister, who took her own life in the port after being raped.
That is film noir in its final form, based on a novel by David Goodis, in desolate cinemascope width and glittering neon, a dead end in cinema history, and the red coupé by Nastassja Kinski … pushes into the void conjured up here Amour fou, a smoldering obsession. The stagnation that Depardieu embodies contrasts with the dynamism of the young filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix, born on October 8, 1946, who shook up French cinema in the early 1980s with the film “Diva”, with great international success, especially in America. His boyishness (and that of his colleagues Luc Besson and Leos Carax) signaled a new beginning.
Legix had worked as an assistant for successful directors, Claude Berri, Claude Zidi and Jean Becker, including “The Day the Clown Wept,” the concentration camp film that Jerry Lewis directed, which was never completed. “Diva” was a classic gangster story, a young man becomes the victim of a mean pursuit of lousy guys – with such a story Truffaut had started the Nouvelle Vague at the time, in “Shoot the Pianist”, also after a Roman noir by David Goodis.
In his film “Diva” opera and action cinema fueled each other
“Diva” became a cult film because two highly artificial art forms fueled each other in it, opera and action cinema. And Beineix, a director who didn’t shy away from the ultimate moment, he sent a motorcyclist on his machine into the metro during a chase. A film for the enjoyment of a fan community. It was different with “The moon in the gutter”. It ran in the Cannes competition and was panned by the critics – the meaningless advertising (and later clip) aesthetics would have triumphed here over the cinema. The film was also unsuccessful with the public because of its hyperstylization and its slowness.
Legix then tried a new revitalization boost, “Betty Blue – 37.2 degrees in the morning”, based on the novel by Philippe Djian. A small success, mainly because of the leading actress Béatrice Dalle. Again a Amour fou, an elegy of lust for life, in the sun of southern France. At the beginning of the 1990s,bailey was able to present the film on DVD in its original length (three hours). When he hoped to release “Mond in der Gosse” in its original length (four hours) as well, the studio informed him that all the additional material had been destroyed. With his other films,bailey could no longer build on the early shooting star-like success, not even with “IP5”, which was the last film with Yves Montand. In 1994, Beineix made the documentary “Otaku” with Jackie Bastide, about young Japanese who lose themselves in the world of video games and lose touch with the real world, like Depardieu in “The Moon in the Gutter.”
Clip aesthetics versus auteur cinema, perhaps the checkered career of Jean-Jacques Beineix cannot be summed up in this simple constellation. Serge Daney, the most important French film critic of the post-Nouvelle Vague period, came to his aid – he had helped French cinema and French criticism out of the author theory trap with great, clear analyzes (shortly before his death he had caught the exciting magazine traffic founded, which is celebrating its thirtieth year these weeks). “The reason why the debate collapsed was that the question wasn’t asked correctly,” wrote Daney when he saw “Diva” again https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/.” Because advertising is more than one Aesthetics, it’s a way of being and perceiving, of evaluating and judging, a way of seeing the world in short.The success of “Diva” came from the fact that Beineix was the first to attempt to morally embrace the legacy of advertising by a new dividing line offered between the unsaleable (the soul, creativity) and the pre-sold (objects, clichés).” Jean-Jacques Beineix died in Paris on Thursday last week at the age of 75.