Benoît Jacquot

A French director who rose through the production ranks and even has acted and written songs, Benoit Jacquot is known for a flashy style and for investigating the innate impulses of human beings in his films. He began working in features in the late 1960s as an assistant director, often associated with Marguerite Duras, with whom he collaborated on such films as "Sweet Hunters" (1969) and "India Song" (1975). By 1975, he had directed his first feature, "L'assassin musicien," but real notice did not come until "Corps et biens/With All Hands" (1986), about a man (Lambert Wilson) who remarries after murdering his wife but is drawn to his former sister-in-law (Dominique Sanda) who suspects his crime. The film speculated on animal attraction and the lure of the unsavory. "Les Mendiants" (1987) starred Sanda and its narratives interwove tales of children, lovers, and criminals and suggested the similarities of their behavioral patterns. In 1995, Jacquot made his seventh feature, "La Fille seule/A Single Girl," in which a woman (Virginie Ledoyen) discovers she is pregnant by her boyfriend on the day she begins work as a maid at a hotel. Through her observations of the hotel guests, she decides to leave her beau and raise the child on her own.