Ahas been in dark rooms for two decades, sprained in 2012 for his documentary The Gauls beyond the myth, Jean-Jacques Beineix marked the end of the seventies and the beginning of the 1980s, with his sulphurous and poetic imprint as a filmmaker. The director died at the age of 75.
The man was a fervent enthusiast of the arts, who preferred discretion to any form of ostentation. Foal to Claude Berri, Jean Becker and Claude Zidi, he began his career as a camera assistant, before turning to directing his own cinematographic works. Firstly there is Diva (1980) with Richard Bohringer and Gérard Darmon, a first attempt and a first popular success. Similar to an clip with its garish images, the atypical aesthetics of the feature film strikes the spirits of the time. Jean-Jacques Beineix receives four César for this wacky thriller.
Three years later, he brings together an exceptional trio for the policeman The Moon in the Gutter. Gérard Depardieu, Nastassja Kinski and Victoria Abril illuminate the director’s slick shots. In 1986, he hired a bewitching young debutante, Béatrice Dalle, to adapt the scandalous novel by Philippe Djian, 37°2 in the morning. The film is prohibited for those under 18 when it is released in France.
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Camera and pen in hand
During his career, Jean-Jacques Beineix made six fiction films, six others relating to documentaries, showing his interest in history and elsewhere. In 2004 and 2006, he published two volumes of a comic strip entitled The deal of the century. This same last year, he participated in the writing of his memoirs, for which he says he has been writing texts since his childhood. In 2015, he briefly turned to the boards to stage the musical and autobiographical play Kiki de Montparnasse. In 2020, the septuagenarian surprises his audience by unveiling the melancholy Toboggan published by Michel Lafon. The last trace of his overflowing imagination left in the world.