The French director Jean-Jacques Beineix leaves behind a slim but very striking work.
While the word postmodern was initially used primarily as a polemical term for an architectural mix of styles, at the beginning of the 1980s it diffused into all arts as a collective term with a blaze of color and beauty. In any case, postmodernism was introduced in the cinema in 1981 with the film “Diva”. It was given the attribute of a cult film mainly because of its excess energy, which was made up of color intensity, dramaturgical tempo and an unusual everyday story. Classic in the metro, so to speak. A Parisian postman secretly records a concert by an opera diva he admires and gets in trouble with two Taiwanese gangsters.
Between cast and glamor
In this film, wit, soundtrack and a Paris between gutter and glamor hold together what doesn’t belong together and convey the dream of an excitingly different life with a hitherto unimagined lightness, without immediately making it appear as pure illusion. The fate and the abysses of the metropolis were too present for annoyed critics to be able to unmask it as a dream world.
Of course, the film “Diva” was not the reinvention of cinema, but abstruse chases could now also be perceived as a visual spectacle without having to raise the spoilsport question: Is it all real?
Jean-Jacques Beineix, born in Paris in 1946, first studied medicine before he was drawn to film, initially as an assistant to director Jean Becker, who had made a number of films with Jean-Paul Belmondo. Between 1964 and 1971, Becker produced a total of 32 episodes for the TV series “A French Marriage” with Beineix as assistant director.
The long apprenticeship alongside other directors probably also explains the professional confidence in the mix of genres that made “Diva” an international box office hit. With “Betty Blue – 37.2 degrees in the morning”, Beineix demonstrated how a light love story on the beach can turn into an existential drama. Behind the feverish lust for life lurks an incurable disease.
It was the debut of the wonderful Béatrice Dalles in 1986. The mysterious beauty with the gap in her teeth had caught the attention of Beineix through a random press photo. Up to that point, Dalles had been hanging around in the Parisian punk scene. The template came from Philippe Djian, whose mellow, romantic novels fit perfectly with the imagery ofbailey.
“The Moon in the Gutter” with Nastassia Kinski and Gérard Depardieu stands out from the rather narrow work by Jean-Jacques Beineix. Legix died in Paris on Friday at the age of 75.
