Benoît Jacquot was one of the many young Parisians who grew up in the 50s and 60s enraptured by movies. Jacquot haunted the Cinemathèque as a teenager and soaked up the atmosphere around him “like the boy in Lang’s Moonfleet,” and he would later quit college to work in the industry. He made his debut in the early 70s, a charter member of the group of filmmakers known, somewhat dubiously, as the “post-New Wave Generation.” To arrive during the quiet after the storm well suited an artist like Jacquot, whose pursuits are so quietly refined as to seem almost elusive, just fine.

It has often been remarked that Jacquot is interested in adaptations — of plays, novels, and short stories, by writers as varied as James, Marivaux, Constant, Borges, Dostoyevsky and James Gunn. It has been just as often remarked that Jacquot has a passion for filming beautiful women of all ages in action — Judith Godrèche, Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Kiberlain, Isild Le Besco; Isabelle Huppert, at different stages of her life; the beautifully aged Catherine Deneuve; not to mention Delphine Seyrig, Anna Karina, Marianne Denicourt, Jeanne Balibar, and Marguerite Duras, the subject of two remarkable filmed portraits. It seems to me that these supposedly separate fields of interest — call them literary and carnal — result from the same impulse, the impulse that has given us an oeuvre of such richly varied topography. Jacquot is forever moving into different registers and new relationships with his material (the controlled surfaces and carefully modulated camera eye of Le Septième ciel, L’Ecole de la chair, and Pas de scandale; the multi-media enchantment of Tosca; the vivid, breezily assured period recreations of Marianne, Sade and Adolphe; the restless camera eye of La Fille seule; the wonderfully sad black-and-white widescreen images of A tout de suite), the better to renew his engagement with cinema.

More than just a modern filmmaker who longs for the conditions of the old studio system, this is an artist in perpetual search of vital connections, a spark of revivifying energy for himself, his actors and his characters. Jacquot once explained to me that with the constantly moving camera and unified duration of La Fille seule, he was trying to create a film that took place in “mental time.” This seems a perfect way of describing his entire body of work, which, considered altogether, is one of the most moving in modern cinema. In a way, each of Jacquot’s films take place in this mental time, dedicated as they are to the realization of a lovely ambition: to describe, as carefully and as gracefully as possible, the relationship between the inner world and the outer world. – Kent Jones