<<< July 2 - 8, 2009 >>>

Presented with the support of the French Film and TV Office in Los Angeles, French Embassy.

"I came up the hard way; I was a gopher for Jean Becker and René Clément, an assistant director to Claude Berri and Claude Zidi. I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club. I didn't get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinéma altar." – Jean-Jacques Beineix

Best known for his surprise cult hits DIVA and BETTY BLUE, director Jean-Jacques Beineix studied medicine, before deciding to indulge his obsession for cinema. In his early teen years in the late 1950s, he made 8mm shorts with his friends. He established a foothold in the French film industry as a hardworking, reliable assistant director in the early 1970s (including work on the legendary, lost Jerry Lewis film THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED). In 1977, he made his first professional short film, "Mr. Michel’s Dog," which won first prize at the Trouville Festival. His debut feature DIVA drew an initially chilly reception in France, but gained momentum in arthouses across the globe, especially in the U.S. Ultimately, it was compared to the work of Orson Welles and garnered four Cesar Awards in 1982, including Best First Work. The criminally underrated THE MOON IN THE GUTTER followed (adapted from American noir scribe David Goodis’ novel), starring Gerard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski. MOON drew flack for its dreamlike stylization, but its reputation continues to grow with each passing year. In 1983, Beineix released one of his most popular films, BETTY BLUE (currently in restored re-release), a work that solidified his cult of fans and was nominated for a Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Ever the rebellious iconoclast, Beineix refused to be relegated to any specific genre and defied expectations with his next, ROSELYNE AND THE LIONS (here in its U.S. Premiere!), his mysterious, hard-to-see look at a love affair set against circus life. In the 1990s, his output was sporadic, yet fascinating, including feature films IP5: THE ISLAND OF THE PACHYDERMS (Yves Montand’s last picture) with Olivier Martinez and the offbeat documentary about Japanese cyber-nerds, OTAKU, as well as acclaimed work for French television. Beineix’s latest, hard-to-see feature, MORTAL TRANSFER (with Jean-Hugues Anglaide) from 2001, is a supremely entertaining return to the stylized, slyly comic type of thriller that first brought him international fame. All films in French with English subtitles unless otherwise noted. Please join us in welcoming director Jean-Jacques Beineix in-person for this brief, but long overdue Los Angeles retrospective of his work.

Thursday, July 2 – 7:30 PM

Director Jean-Jacques Beineix In-Person!

THE MOON IN THE GUTTER (LA LUNE DANS LE CANIVEAU), 1983, Cinema Libre, 137 min. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s terrifically atmospheric and vastly underrated adaptation of David Goodis’ noir classic stars Gerard Depardieu as a raffish longshoreman who mourns the suicide of his raped sister amongst the bars and sleazy dives of the seedy Marseilles waterfront. When mystery girl Nastassja Kinski goes slumming in his neighborhood, Depardieu is bewitched by her beauty and soon learns she may know something about the identity of his sibling’s attacker. Beinieix updates writer Goodis’ dark urban underworld into a color-coded dreamland of nightmarish regret and longing, yet still somehow faithfully retains the essence of the original novel. Delirious, audacious and unashamed of its breathtakingly stylized sets. "Visually stunning…Beineix succeeds in creating a dream world where you can expect anything in the next moment, good or bad." – The Spinning Image (UK) (Screened from a digital source) NOT ON DVD

Preceded by the short: "Mr. Michel’s Dog" (1977, 14 min.) Beineix’s very first serious (and award-winning) foray into filmmaking. Discussion following the feature film with director Jean-Jacques Beineix.  Trailer

Sunday, July 5 – 7:30 PM

U.S. Premiere! ROSELYNE AND THE LIONS (ROSELYNE ET LES LIONS), 1989, Cinema Libre, 170 min. Dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix. Thierry (Gerard Sandoz) drops out of school to apprentice as a circus lion tamer. Soon after, he and fellow trainee Roselyne (Isabelle Pasco) fall in love, he’s fired, and Roselyne leaves with him. The lovebirds journey across France looking for work, hitting up various circuses along the way. Finally they get closer to their aspirations when they’re hired on by a German circus in Munich and both fall under the tutelage of aging big-cat trainer Klint (Gunter Meisner). Beineix’s highly unusual, magical film has never been released in America. Don’t miss this rare opportunity! NOT ON DVD Trailer

Preceded by the short: "Locked-In Syndrome" (1997, 27 min.) Come see director Beineix’s original short take on the true story that would eventually be remade as the award-winning feature THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY. Discussion following the feature film with director Jean-Jacques Beineix. (TBC)

Wednesday, July 8 – 7:30 PM

Los Angeles Premiere! MORTAL TRANSFER (MORTEL TRANSFERT), 2001, Cinema Libre, 122 min. Overwhelmed psychoanalyst Michel (Jean-Hugues Anglade) falls asleep while listening to sado-masochist kleptomaniac patient Olga (Helene de Fougerolles) and awakens to find her strangled. Panicking, he decides to get rid of her body himself, lest he be saddled with her murder. Complications erupt when Olga’s rich husband (Yves Renier) comes looking for stolen money and Michel’s other neurotic patients clamour for attention. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix keeps a mesmerizing balance on a tightrope between poisonously dark comedy and psychological thriller. This is another of Beineix’s films almost impossible to see in America since its original European release. (Screened from a digital source) "Beineix is…aiming for the sort of darkly comic details and plausibly presented incongruities favored by, say, the Coen brothers…there is a methodical genre-bending at work that draws much inspiration from the ‘wrong man’ school of film noir…Widescreen results are sumptuous in a perfectly controlled, borderline surreal register…the level of craft is still unmistakable…" – Lisa Nesselson, Variety NOT ON DVD Trailer

DIVA, 1981, Rialto Pictures, 123 min. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix scored a bull’s-eye internationally at arthouse box offices with his debut film, a deftly constructed soufflé of a suspense thriller with a comic, tongue-in-cheek tone. Postman and opera fanatic Jules (Frederic Andrei) surreptitiously records his idol, diva Cynthia (Wilhemenia Wiggins Fernandez), and is so overcome by her performance that he steals her costume from her dressing room, which causes a scandal. Later, while on his rounds, he encounters two thugs beating up a woman and is the unwitting recipient of a blackmail tape that the victim sneaks into his letter bag. Soon the chase is on, with not only the hoods (including Dominic Pinon) but also Taiwanese music bootleggers hoping to steal his opera cassette. Before things come to a head, Jules befriends singer Cynthia and is aided in his escape from danger by a teenage Vietnamese street girl and a sophisticated mystery man (Richard Bohringer). "…One of the best thrillers of recent years but, more than that, it is a brilliant film, a visual extravaganza that announces the considerable gifts of its young director, Jean-Jacques Beineix…Filled with so many small character touches, so many perfectly observed intimacies, so many visual inventions, from the sly to the grand, that the thriller plot is just a bonus… Pauline Kael has compared Beineix to Orson Welles and, as Welles so often did, he has made a movie that is a feast to look at, regardless of its subject." – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times Trailer