The director of Diva and Betty Blue was often labelled all flash and nothing else but his finest work showed far much more
During Margaret Thatcher’s reign in the 1980s, British cinema was largely downbeat, caustic, political and oppositionist. But over the channel in François Mitterrand’s France, the movies were glitzy and flashy, with a sexy if superficial neon sheen: the so-called cinéma du look. No director was more responsible for this than Jean-Jacques Beineix.
He became both famed and mocked for that colossal 1986 hit which launched the smouldering career of its star Beatrice Dalle: Betty Blue, a steamy drama in which an aspiring writer embarks on a passionate, destructive affair with Dalle’s impetuous siren, Betty. It was nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars, the Globes and the Baftas and got nine César nominations. But Betty Blue actually won just one César: the horribly appropriate award for best poster (an award discontinued a few years afterwards), the iconic image of the young Dalle looming beautifully up in the blue of deepening sunset-sky with the beach shack starkly picked out down below on a glowing horizon. It was a poster that adorned a million student bedroom walls and soon the movie, and Beineix himself, came to be looked down on as a callow 1980s taste: the legwarmers of French cinema.
