PARIS (AFP) – Oscar-nominated movie director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who has died aged 75, survived a panning by French critics to make Betty Blue, certainly one of most iconic movies of the Eighties.
Beineix died this week after an extended sickness at his residence in Paris, his household confirmed to AFP.
The filmmaker – who tended to take criticism to coronary heart – by no means forgot the drubbing he took for his first movie Diva in 1981, which solely grew to become successful in France after it had been heaped with prizes overseas.
Many years later Beineix – a pioneer of the French “cinema du look” that was later embraced by Luc Besson (The Fifth Ingredient) – was nonetheless smarting from being dismissed for his “ad-man’s aesthetic” of favouring type over story.
“Nobody is a prophet in their very own land,” mentioned Beineix, who skilled as a physician earlier than making his identify with a hanging tv public well being warning about Aids.
His second movie The Moon In The Gutter, starring Gerard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski, additionally obtained a vital kicking, with Beineix saying he “by no means obtained over” being booed at its premiere on the Cannes movie pageant in 1983.
“The harm is there. The truth that I’m completed at this time began there,” he advised French radio in 2020.
Damage
Regardless of Betty Blue’s deluge of Oscar, Golden Globe and Bafta nominations, French critics known as it pretentious and boring.
Nonetheless, the poster that includes actress Beatrice Dalle went on to adorn hundreds of thousands of bedrooms internationally.
“I really like you,” Dalle wrote in a message to Beineix on her Instagram web page on Friday (Jan 14), including that the filming had been “one of the stunning pages of my life”.
But removed from basking within the movie’s glory, the film’s success anxious the director on the time.
“It could possibly change your life ceaselessly – in good methods and in loads of dangerous,” he mentioned.
