No arthouse cinema repertory programme in the 1980s was complete without regular screenings of the chic French thriller Diva (1981). The plot combined opera, murder and corruption, while the visual style had the sort of pizzazz more readily associated with advertising or pop videos. By the end of the same decade, the prospect of a student bedsit that did not have on its walls the poster for the erotic love story Betty Blue (1986) was as unthinkable as one without Pot Noodle and patchouli oil. Both films were directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, who has died aged 75 after a long illness.
Diva concerns Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a postal worker who makes an illegal bootleg tape of an American opera singer (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) famous for refusing to allow her voice to be recorded. This cassette becomes mixed up with one containing testimony incriminating a high-ranking police officer, and soon Jules is being chased by cops and thugs alike.
Fernandez initially rejected the script, which Beineix had adapted with Jean Van Hamme from the novel by Daniel Odier, who published it under the pseudonym Delacorta. “I was reading murder, prostitution and drugs, and I wanted nothing to do with it,” she said in 1983. “Jean-Jacques forced me to read it with him. Then I realised it was actually light, like a Disney treatment of a Hitchcock film.” She was relatively unknown at the time, and the singer’s profile was boosted by her performance, which included a rendition of the aria Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from the opera La Wally.
Diva heralded the arrival of a flashy mode of film-making later termed “cinéma du look”. Reaction to the movie from French critics, however, was hostile. “I thought I had made two films for the price of one,” the director said in 2009. “My first and my last.”
His producers were reluctant to submit Diva to the Toronto film festival, fearing that international exposure would further harm the movie’s reputation. “What damage can we do to this picture?” asked Beineix. “We’re already dead!” Stepping off the plane in Toronto, he went straight to the cinema where he found a standing ovation underway. “I thought, ‘Something’s wrong. I’m in another dimension.’”
The film was acclaimed by international critics. David Denby in New York magazine praised its “rapturous pop beauty” and likened Beineix to Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. Still playing in Paris after a year, Diva won four César awards, including the prize for best first film.
The Moon in the Gutter (1983) was a textbook case of the sophomore slump. Adapted by the director and Olivier Mergault from the pulp novel by David Goodis, whose work had previously been filmed by François Truffaut and Sam Fuller, it was a grandiose affair which prioritised slick, post-modern artifice over actors (including Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski) and made only the feeblest connection with audiences.
Critics scoffed, including Pauline Kael, who had found his debut “genuinely sparkling” but now declared its follow-up “excruciatingly silly.” After the response to Diva, which Beineix called a “wonderful dream, where I was flying on the wings of victory”, he experienced a sudden fall. “Bang, bang, bang: I’m shot down. It was very scary.”
He recovered with Betty Blue, which he adapted from Philippe Djian’s novel 37°2 le matin, about Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a house-painter and aspiring novelist, and his passionate, volatile girlfriend. The gifted 21-year-old newcomer Béatrice Dalle beat Isabelle Adjani to the title role.
This tale of amour fou opens with an extended sex scene filmed in one take and beginning in wide shot before gradually moving in closer onto the lovers. In the script, the scene had occurred 10 minutes into the movie but Beineix changed his mind in the editing room. “I realised: That’s the base of everything.” He regarded it as “a political statement” but Dalle complained that he had not insisted on a closed set during her nude scenes. “I still have a grudge with Beineix about that,” she said in 2013. “[The crew] all stayed there, like they were on the set of an X-rated movie. Appalling. Horrible.”
Her untamed performance is the highlight of a film which also boasts luminous cinematography by Jean-François Robin. It was he who steered the colour scheme away from the refrigerated blues of Diva and The Moon in the Gutter by pointing out that this was “a sun and sweat story” which might benefit from resembling “Kodachrome slides shot by amateurs. Holiday snapshots, warm and sunny.”
The film takes a rather ugly turn – Zorg’s literary prospects improve only once Betty is in a psychiatric institution, where he finally smothers her with a pillow. It had enough admirers, though, to earn Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe nominations for best foreign language film, and to warrant the release five years later of a director’s cut extending the running time from two hours to three.
Beineix was born in Paris, the son of Madeleine (nee Maréchal) and Robert Beineix, an insurance salesman. He was educated at the Lycée Carnot and the Lycée Condorcet, both in Paris. He studied medicine, then quit to become an assistant director to film-makers such as Jean Becker, Claude Berri and Claude Zidi. He was second assistant director on Jerry Lewis’s controversial drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972), in which Lewis plays an entertainer leading Jewish children to the Nazi gas chambers; it has never been released, and Lewis stipulated that it cannot be shown until 2024. Beineix’s only directing credit prior to Diva was the short Le Chien de Monsieur Michel (1977).
In the wake of his success with Diva, he was courted by US studios. “At first, Hollywood saw me as some kind of exotic puppet,” he said. A vampire comedy he wrote for Paramount was never made, a contract with the producer Edward R Pressman came to nought, and he declined offers to work as a hired hand. “The privilege of being a French director is that you are basically free to do what you want. The disaster is that you don’t understand that the rest of the world doesn’t work like this.”
After Betty Blue, interest in his films began to wane outside France. Roselyne and the Lions (1989) was a meandering love story about a pair of circus workers. The whimsical IP5 (1992) featured Yves Montand’s final performance. Beineix moved into documentaries, among them Locked-In Syndrome (1997), which told the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a stroke which left him unable to communicate except by blinking one eyelid. Beineix turned down the invitation to make the dramatised version, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was directed in 2007 by Julian Schnabel.
His last fiction film was Mortal Transfer (2001), a macabre farce starring Anglade as a psychoanalyst who must dispose of a patient’s body; Beineix ploughed $2m of his own money into the project. In 2004, he co-wrote the vampire-themed graphic novel L’Affaire Du Siècle; a second instalment arrived in 2006 along with his first volume of memoir, Les Chantiers de la Gloire, which ran to 835 pages. A novel, Toboggan, was published in 2020.
Beineix described himself in 2006 as “arrogant, a provocateur. I must be a little bit in love with failure because I provoke it. It happens that when you are afraid to be loved, you inspire hostility. It’s perverse.”
He is survived by his wife, Agnès, and daughter, Frida.
• Jean-Jacques Beineix, film director, born 8 October 1946; died 13 January 2022
• This article was amended on 18 January 2022 to correctly spell the first name of his mother as Madeleine, not Madeline, and the surname of the writer of 37°2 le matin as Djian, not Dijan.
