Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Jean-Jacques Beineix, Destination Moon… or not!

Yesterday at Cannes, the filmmaker defended, tooth and nail, his aesthetics. 

We can’t say that The Moon in the Gutter received much praise at Cannes. Eagerly anticipated, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s second film is likely to disappoint those who liked his first film without convincing the others. In the middle of this complete failure, some real questions about the cinema. What if this new religion of “The Image” announced the return of an art?

Beineix’s second opus ended up being received with a few jeers and some half-hearted hisses. Never mind, the post-Diva era has begun and Beineix is both its symptom and prophet. It was perhaps inevitable that the critics, who had zero role to play in the cult success of Diva, jumped furiously on The Moon in the Gutter. It was too good an opportunity since it is indeed a complete failure. But unlike a bad film (boring, tense, autistic, etc), this second opus comes across as a curiosity. The first ugly-looking cathedral of the 36th festival. 

The story – you guessed it – is of little importance. A lot of money has been spent in Cinecittà to recreate the shabby universe of the great David Goodis. “Obsession” and “discontent” are the only two common threads. In a stylised America, a man hesitates between two women (one, jealous, who already loves him, “downtown”, the other, appearing from another world, “uptown”). At the same time, this man is “searching” for the identity of the rapist responsible for his sister’s suicide. 

The film goes back and forth, with a rolling of the story, a pitching and tossing of the fiction, a seasickness that gently repulses, a nausea from seeing all these means put to a rather modest end: to remake in vitro the cinema of “poetic realism” in the era of loft apartments, neon lights, Coppola’s high tech and “filmed cinema”.

We remember how, in poetic realism and old-style studio cinema, characters carried around a soiled soul and an inalienable right to purity. They collided with the decor, seemed lost, panicked, confined (Carné). Beineix inherits this “atmosphere”. As a filmmaker, he does the same. He keeps on slowing down the story so that we have the time to appreciate the work on the image. A work of labour consisting in multiplying cutaway shots, finding additional camera angles, lighting effects and unexpected details. In a word, to generate images behind the fiction’s back. A scene by Beineix works most often like crab steering. It progresses sideway or even in reverse, hitting the audience with a million proof points of Beineix’s cinematographic know-how and desire. With each proof point, we go back to square one. The film is like this motorbike that we saw yesterday at the Croisette, across from the Carlton, equipped with all the modern and postmodern features, so much so that we wondered if it actually worked. 

Diva was said to emerge from advertising aesthetics. We know that the only on-the-job training available to young filmmakers is advertising. Recently, this situation seems to have become acceptable. And, whether we want it or not, the return of formalism and of the tradition of quality (pre-New Wave) can only happen today on the back of the recycling of techniques and effects from the advertising world. Filmmakers attempt to prove that two hours of tv adverts put together can make a film, like a thousand rockets can form a firework. We know that nothing will be left of it, that the sky will become dark again, like a bottomless abyss, but the bet is up (see Deadly Circuit). And with Beineix, it’s even a challenge. 

It doesn’t work of course. It doesn’t work because advertising is still an ironic and ephemeral product. It doesn’t work because in his praise for the Image and solely the image, Beineix forgets that advertising is an image of seduction with only one concluding word: the name of the brand. If the moon ends up catching a cold in this gutter designed for a sniffer Louma crane, it is because Beineix over-advertises the brand “Image” and the sub-brand “Shot”. This narcissism wouldn’t matter if it didn’t end up, forever looping on itself, excluding the spectator. 

So, the film is a curiosity. Beineix said during the press conference that he enjoyed watching films in places that one can’t escape from: planes for example. He forgets two things: that it is possible to sleep on a plane or (like me) to refuse to pay two dollars for the headphones. The Moon in the Gutter is fundamentally a silent, aphasic film and its dialogue – even when murmured – is unworthy of a bad Delannoy of the forties. But would the film, reduced to its image only, function? Yes, but like a silent film seen out of the corner of your eye, like a trendy music video, a logorrhoea of images transplanted randomly onto a skeletal story and sketches of bodies (Depardieu isn’t bad but acts already “electronically”, like the actors in Tron who don’t see the rest of the image that they are immersed into). 

And once we have understood that we can only glean things in the gutter, we are free to think. 

During the screening of The Moon in the Gutter, one can play back the history of the cinema and fill it up like a shopping basket. Let’s salute a nice trailer (but without much of a film after), a good ad (with no after-sale service), an effective industrial film (not backed by an enterprise), etc. It’s a voyage in the country of the commercial image (the one that sells something and the one that sells itself) at the service of a metaphysical quest for the Cinema and the Great Work. Nothing prevents us, in the darkness of the film theatre, to ask fundamental questions: what is it, where does it come from, where is it going (the cinema)? Does it necessarily go – for better or, in this case, for worse – through the reflection of too pure moons in too dirty gutters?

In any case, Beineix, claws out, takes on an old line about his art: the Cinema, he says, is the Image. Perhaps but then one shouldn’t pretend to be surprised if, with crime novels as stock of stories, studios as return to the fold, and advertising as formal matrix, we can logically expect a new religion when it comes to the cinema. A Sulpician art. 

First published in Libération on May 13th, 1983. Re-printed in La maison cinéma et le monde, vol 2, P.O.L., 2002.