Jean-Jacques Beineix

“Movie in the Gutter” was just one of the many inventive scathing word-twists from the critics on the title of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1983 Rococo noir, Moon in the Gutter. Based upon a pulp novel by David Goodis (whose work is probably best-known to film fans for the 1947 Bogart vehicle, Dark Passage), Moon in the Gutter was booed at Cannes, disowned by its star Gerard Depardieu, and brought its cocky young director down a few notches after his big successes with his award-winning short film Mr. Michel’s Dog (1977) and Diva (1981). While Beineix would rally with the Oscar-nominated Betty Blue three years later, to date he’s still simply a curio in the world of modern art cinema.

He is, however, a living curio, and he is here in the City of Angels for our Independence Day weekend. I was lucky enough to catch Beineix on his inaugural evening at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood on July 1st, where he showed us the amusing 14-minute short Mr. Michel’s Dog and the visually stirring feature Moon in the Gutter. The effusive auteur later spoke about his works in detail and shared some insights into the heady, intoxicating roller-coaster days of the early ’80s in cinema. He’d always dreamed of doing a movie at Cinecittà, playing in Hollywood, and bowing at Cannes… He accomplished all with wildly mixed results.

“We were in the ’80s,” he said during the Q&A. “We had no Internet, just the old fashioned telephone, so no one really knew the movie was a bomb at first. And in France, where Diva initially flopped, the producers didn’t know it had become a critical success in America. Can you imagine nowadays, not knowing the day, the minute a film comes out if it is a success or a failure?” He also spoke of ’80s indulgence, spending the producers’ money hand-over-fist, demanding that actress Nastassja Kinski’s designer red dress match the color of her Ferrari in the film…and getting it. But be careful what you ask for. Taking the movie to Cannes, he said, was like being on the wrong side of a public execution.

Moon in the Gutter may be a mess, but it’s a beautiful, luscious, molten, colorful one. “For every dollar I am given, I try to give back two, but I cannot turn stones into gold, so I needed money to make this movie, and I didn’t think it was ugly to spend money to make this film because it works in its way. It works only in its way. And I was encouraged because of Diva. Diva was such a big success, so the producers hired me to do this movie based on a detective novel. They wanted a film noir but I hijacked the movie and made something different, and they just went crazy when they saw this.”

While the decades have softened the director’s passion for being obscenely stylish at any cost, he makes no apologies for Moon in the Gutter. “I was nuts [when I made the movie]! But it is a state of madness to which you fall prey only once in your life. You cannot stay there. It’s just impossible. But I was crazy during this movie. I was flying. I was in love with this film. In fact, what you saw was the short version — there is a four-hour cut.”

Cinema Libre, who are instrumental along with American Cinematheque in putting this mini-Beineix festival together, will be releasing Moon in the Gutter on DVD for the first time ever (in the U.S.), along with Roselyn and the Lions, which will be playing on Sunday, July 5th with the director in attendance:

Sunday – 7:30 p.m. - Roselyne et les lions: 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.

The festival concludes on Wednesday, July 8th – 7:30 p.m., sans director appearance.

Jean-Jacques Beineix Double Feature:

Los Angeles Premiere! MORTAL TRANSFER, 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 clamor 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).

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).

Story and photo by Staci Layne Wilson