Diva

Jean-Jacques Beineix was born in Paris in 1946. Though he was obsessed with cinema as a young man, he initially attended medical school, but dropped out during the events of 1968, during which he worked as a stretcher carrier on the streets of Paris. A year later, the French film school IDHEC rejected his application to attend, but Beineix found work on the set of the TV series Les saintes chéries. He polished his film skills over subsequent years by working as a director’s assistant on about 14 films, including with Claude Berri, René Clément, Claude Zidi and Jerry Lewis. Beineix’s first independent project was the 1977 Cezar-nominated short Mr. Michel’s Dog, followed in 1981 by Diva, the director’s feature film debut. Despite several tepid reviews, which accused Beineix of overly severe formalism and a fixation with advertising and music video aesthetics, the film achieved relative success in France and the United States. Beineix’s characteristic style bloomed fully in a film he made two years later for the Italian studio Cinecittà, The Moon in the Gutter (1983), where a thick oneiric feel initially put off critics and audiences to later attain cult status. Meanwhile, his film Betty (1983), starring the captivating Béatrice Dalle, French it-girl, who expressed the spirit of the 1980s (like Brigitte Bardot of the 1950s and 1960s) attained that cult status much faster. Beineix’s next two projects, Roselyne and the Lions and IP5: The Island of Pachyderms,are tales of initiation based on Beineix’s original scripts written with Jacques Forgeas. After the unexpected death of actor Yves Montand during the filming of IP5, the director abandoned the script in favor of a documentary about the paralyzed editor in chief of ‘Elle’ magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the basis for director Julian Schnabel’s later film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007). Beineix’s latest feature film remains the psychological crime drama Mortal Transfer (2001).