Jean-Jacques Beineix was born in Paris in October 1946, and he knew from a very young age that he would not turn out as his family expected. He studied medicine but it didn't inspire him as a career, so he went to hang out on film sets where he first met and worked as an assistant to Claude Zidi, Réné Clément and Claude Berri.

He made a short film, Le Chien de Monsieur Michel (1977), before his big break came with the adaptation of Diva, a crime series by Delacorta, which put him at the head of the new school of French cinema in the 1980s. Starting with the first film, nothing happened normally for this stubborn but courageous, brilliant and talented young man. He shrugged off norms and labels with his steely personality, and his innate sense of imagery and aesthetic qualified him as a neo-romantic, fascinated by refined framing, his taste for colorful pictures, in between a dream quality and hyper-realism.

The theatrical debut of Diva, the story of a postal worker who falls in love with an opera singer, was a critical catastrophe, with the Parisian intellectuals hounding the new artist because his vision grated, disrupted and didn't follow the establishment. Luc Bresson would later suffer the same crucifixion.

However, a miracle occurred: a few ardent defenders launched a laudatory word-of-mouth campaign. The film resisted criticism and held on, slowly finding an audience, and after a few months became a cult classic.

The damned artist was born: he had learned that he would have to fight his battles alone against the mainstream. Jean-Jacques Beineix never recovered from the violent criticism he received during that spring of 1980.
But Diva was still there, a work both fascinating and beautiful, moving and musical, erotic and dark.

After this first attempt that garnered such media attention, the director moved from independent filmmaking to big budget production, directing La Lune Dans le Caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter), adapted from the American thriller master David Goodis for Gaumont two years later in 1983. From the Cinecitta studios to the docks of Marseille used for the outdoor scenes, Beineix led the couple of Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski through a strange and neurotic love story, where the red of blood and passion replaced the blues of Diva. When it was released, it weathered a stinging commercial failure compounded by its presentation in competition at Cannes, where Beineix suffered another lynching. He left Cannes on the same boat he arrived in, bruised and bitter, closed up with his solitude in his ivory tower.

His triumph was not far off. It would come with his third lyrical thriller, 37°2 le Matin (Betty Blue), in 1986, adapted from Philippe Dijan. This time the adaptation struck a balance between the style, the plot and the actors, the mythic couple of Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hughes Anglade. The film concerns an unrecognized writer who accompanies a "femme fatale" on a sexual and picaresque flight across France, the inverse of Pierrot Le Fou. Beineix's maturing as a director was evident in the film's perfection, heralding more great films to come. This time the critics and the public were in sync.

He followed with Roselyne et Les Lions (Roselyne and the Lions) in 1988, a very personal work that deserves to be rediscovered, and in 1991, IP5, starring Yves Montaud, which was overshadowed by the actor's death between the end of shooting and its theatrical release. Recently, Jean-Jacques Beineix said on a television set that the rumor that he hastened Montand's death by his bathing in a lake was slanderous. After the biting failure of the film, Beineix disappeared from the industry for almost ten years until the release of Mortel Transfert (Mortal Transfer) last January.

He took refuge in painting, writing and directing exceptional documentaries, revealing another side to his talent and the quality of his vision: The Children of Romania in 1992, Otaku in 1993 (where he gave free rein to his passion and fascination with Japan), and more recently the heartbreaking film about the death of Jean-Dominique Bauby, Assigné à Residence.

What will this gifted director, whose films are too infrequently on screen, do now? Mortel Transfert, despite the masterful and strong production filled with all of Beineix's obsessions, was once again scorned by the public and exhausted by critics, like a settling of scores that is never finished.

This director who incites intrigue and injustice should continue making films, always rebounding onto new projects. In his company Cargo Films, where he remains the owner of his films and the rights to them, he is the only one who can decide his destiny: a strange or a fabulous destiny, depending on the point of view and the time of day, but the destiny of a filmmaker is an absolute certainty.

Michel Pascal