JEAN-JACQUES BEINEIX

(8 October 1946 – 1 3 January 2022)

The French film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who has died at the age of 75, had a short film career lasting over twenty years in which he made just six features and six documentaries, plus a few shorts. His main reputation is based on three films, Diva, Moon in the Gutter and Betty Blue.

The son of an insurance company director, Robert Beineix, and his wife Madeleine Marechal, Jean-Jacques studied at two Lycees in Paris and then began medical training. With his lifelong love of cinema, he later enrolled at the Paris film school but failed his exams. He then worked as an assistant to Jean Becker on a television series for three years before joining directors Claude Berri and Claude Zidi and was also involved with The Day the Clown Died (1972), Jerry Lewis's controversial film about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp (that was never released).

After making an award-winning short, Le Chien de M. Michel, Beineix directed Diva, about a postman's obsession with an opera singer. It was very successful and led to his being dubbed as a director of the cinema du look, a French film critic's idea about the new appearance of the then current French cinema in which colour, lighting and highly technical direction were the mainstay of a production. Other directors in this category included Luc Besson and Leos Carax.

Diva won four French César awards. His next feature, Moon in the Gutter, starred Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski in a drama about two women, one a photographer and the other a prostitute, who both chase after a dock worker (Depardieu). Although it was an entry at the Cannes festival in 1983, it was not a commercial success.

Three years later came Betty Blue which was nominated for Academy, Bafta and Golden Globe awards. Jean-Hugues Anglade played a writer working as a seaside odd job man who has an affair with the teenage Betty (Béatrice Dalle) and their relationship develops into obsession and ultimately madness. It gained a doubtful reputation from its very graphic opening sex scene. It was initially released in a two-hour version in 1986, but in 2000 it was re-issued in a director's cut version with a further hour of film.

In 1989 Roselynne et les lions, about a couple of circus lion trainers, was less successful, while IP5: L'île aux pachydermes, Beineix's fifth film, had Yves Montand in his last performance playing an old man, a shaman who has escaped from an asylum, who meets two young thieves in Toulouse. It was fine but not a classic production.

Beineix's next six films were all documentaries including Assigné à résidence (aka Locked in Syndrome) about the editor of Elle magazine who suffered a stroke. It was later made into the dramatic biopic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly but not by Beineix. He finished his feature film career in 2001 with Mortal Transfer, a thriller about a psychoanalyst who falls asleep during a session with a patient only to find that when he wakes up she has been choked to death. He made a few more TV documentaries until 2013 including Loft Paradoxe, about the success of a reality show on French television. And that was the final shot from an always disputatious director of the school of cinema du look.

Jean-Jacques Beineix was married to his wife Agnes, but his daughter Frida is from a previous relationship with the actress Valentina Sauca.

MICHAEL DARVELL