Institute History
Description
Jean-Jacques Beineix has, with three films and one short in less than a decade, impressed himself upon the international cinema scene as one of the very few original and seminal talents currently directing. After a long, complicated tale, Diva became the biggest commercial and critical success the French cinema has ever known outside France, and returned in triumph for a further career in France. The French critical establishment revenged the exposure of their impotence and incompetence by savaging Beineix’s The Moon in the Gutter. Not so strangely, both films have never stopped being an important source of inspiration for younger, more open directors.
Betty Blue is neither Diva II or The Moon II. Beineix already make those films and has no intention of repeating himself. Of course Beineix remains Beineix; his source is, again, a popular “polar” romance; his theme is, again, romantic love (an “amour fou,” this time), but it is treated with neither the tender complicity of Diva nor the corrosiveness of The Moon in the Gutter. The tale is taken straight on.