An auteur returns

>> Jean-Jacques Beineix triumphs with his bizarre necro-comedy noir Mortel transfert

by MATTHEW HAYS

It smacks of an insulting question, so perhaps it's best not asked. But sitting in front of Jean-Jacques Beineix, the flashy, much-celebrated toast of European '80s cinema, it's impossible not to think it: what did ever happen to Beineix?

He first came to world renown with Diva, his funny, quirky, visually stunning hit about an obsession with a reclusive opera singer and the mob, which struck a nerve with international audiences and broke box-office records in '81. Then there was La lune dans le caniveau (The Moon in the Gutter), which played in Cannes' prestigious selection and again proved a crowd pleaser. And perhaps most famously, the intensely sexual 37o 2 le matin (released in North America as Betty Blue), which was ultimately nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

But then, Beineix kind of fell off the radar. While remaining busy--he also makes documentaries, paints and has been an activist against globalization--the auteur admits he feels much of the past eight years has felt strange without fiction filmmaking. "I couldn't make pictures for years," he says. "I went through a crisis. I had the feeling that anything I could film was not good enough. I was lacking that interest in anything. That's why to save myself from desperation I went in for documentary. What people have to tell you is more important than what you are. So in a way it was a way to avoid self-indulgence." But, while happy to be back, Beineix admits to regretting having taken so much time away from fiction.



Return of the dead

It's an odd little comeback, then, and not exactly subject matter that you would think would cheer someone up. But Beineix's latest--which opens the Cinemania Film Fest tonight as part of a retrospective of his earlier films--is Mortel transfert, a bizarre, twisted feature in which a tortured psychotherapist (played by Betty Blue star Jean-Hughes Anglade) finds his kinky sadomasochistic patient (the stunning Hélène de Fougerolles) dead on his couch. He must then hide the body and figure out who killed her. Did he do it in his sleep? Where's the money her furious mobster widower is demanding Anglade cough up? The mysteries abound, as do the Trouble With Harry-esque gags about cumbersome corpses.

The film opened in France in January, and has suffered as a result of a small but noisy minority of French critics who simply hated it outright. Beineix, who seems surprisingly warm, especially in light of his being a Parisian, seems at peace with the critical venom that has surrounded him from day one. "It all dates back to Diva. The film was dismissed by French critics but then went on to huge success in America, Europe, Canada and Quebec. Then it reopened in France and did well there too. I made the mistake, while a young man, of saying that the critics were stupid. That stuck with them. When this movie opened, they said it was open season on Beineix. They turned wild and said it was a piece of shit. It was not good for the reputation of the movie but we're getting past that now through the festivals."



Savouring screen sex

For all his visual flare, Beineix's most memorable screen moment will probably always be the opening scene in Betty Blue, in which a man and a woman fornicate and, in one take, the camera dollies almost a full 360 degrees around them. (Yes, they were really doing it.) Here, there are echoes of that sexual frankness, with clear necro-overtones and even a scene where one man has sex with a blow-up doll. "I push this a little bit forward and I try to make fun out of it. This is a situation of comedy, where a man tries to dump a body in the cemetery and then finds that there's another man there who thinks they're both necrophiles."

With such dark overtones to his comedy, does Beineix think audiences will take to it in the same way in a post-9/11 world? "Irony was only dead for a few weeks. Even some concentration camp people were trying to have moments of comedy. There are now jokes about the Twin Towers and terrorists. It's a way of defending ourselves against desperation, against the most terrible things. Lubitsch and Charlie Chaplin made comedies about the Nazis. Can we laugh about this? We laugh about everything.

"This is part of the burden of being alive."

Mortel transfert is the opening film of Cinemania tonight, Thursday, Nov. 1. The Jean-Jacques Beineix retrospective continues throughout the festival until Nov. 11