Death of director Jean-Jacques Beineix

(Paris) Director Jean-Jacques Beineix has died at the age of 75, after a short career that marked the 1980s and a cult film 37.2° in the morning which revealed Béatrice Dalle.

The director died Thursday at his Parisian home, his brother Jean-Claude, as well as his wife and daughter, told AFP. He died after a long illness.

For some, Beineix will remain the director of Diva (1981), César for best first work the following year, then The moon in the gutter (1983), who made him famous. He remembered above all having been insulted at Cannes for this last film.

But most will remember 37.2° in the morning (1986), seen by 3.6 million viewers and which has since gained cult status.

Story of torrid and destructive passion between two flayed alive overtaken by madness, Betty and Zorg, interpreted by Béatrice Dalle, then unknown, and Jean-Hugues Anglade, the film is an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Philippe Djian. Nominated nine times for the Césars, 37°2 in the morning was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

“Zorg and Betty are orphans”, reacted on Instagram Béatrice Dalle, remembering the shooting as one “of the most beautiful pages of my life”. “I love you”, she wrote again for the deceased director.

Actress Romane Bohringer, whose father Richard got one of his first movie roles in Diva, also wanted to say “thank you” to the director: “This film has in fact changed our lives and marked my childhood. I keep a dazzled memory of it”.

Beineix had “a guts, a style, a method, the grandiose assurance of the stubborn”, greeted the former president of the Cannes Film Festival Gilles Jacob.

“Ditch with the cinema”

Gaumont and the Académie des Césars paid tribute to him on Twitter. “He was the filmmaker of a whole generation and had abdicated in front of the gap which he considered to have dug between him and the cinema. However, we owe him very great films, ”responded the SACD (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers) on social networks.

Born in Paris in the Batignolles district, Jean-Jacques Beineix began studying medicine before preparing for the prestigious Idhec film school (now Femis) which he narrowly missed.

His first projects lead him to advertising. In particular, he produced the multi-broadcast fight against AIDS advertising “He will not pass by me”. After several projects, he decides to leave the industry.

“It’s good to put your talent at the service of causes” and advertising, “it was not causes,” he explained. Its aesthetics will remain very marked by advertising, which its detractors will reproach it for.

After 37°2 in the morning will follow several films, all failures, including Roselyne and the lions and IP5-Pachyderm Island, the last of Yves Montand, who died just at the end of filming.

In 2001, after nine years of absence, he returned with Deadly transfer, a complete critical and commercial failure. He declares, moreover, that this film strongly indebted him. This will be the last of his six feature films, followed by television documentaries (The children of Romania, Place Clichy without complexes…), under the banner of his production company, Cargos Films.

A sign of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s eclecticism, the director and former porn actress, who has become a feminist activist, Ovidie, said she was very “saddened” by the death of the man who had “put her on track” by producing her first documentary, before they fall out.