Benoît Jacquot has thus created an oeuvre of unusual eclecticism, alternating documentaries and fiction, films made for television (recently, Gaspard de Besse in 2006) and films for the cinema (Villa Amalia in 2009), demanding, low-budget films (La Désenchantée, La Fille seule, À tout de suite...) and large historical frescos (Sade, Tosca, Princesse Marie...). He is among the few directors who quickly learned how to adapt their talents to the evolution of technologies (digital) and production (cinema or television).

In addition to this eclecticism of cinematic forms, there is his attachment to and special sensibility for actors, which allow him to discover young actors (Judith Godrèche, Sandrine Kiberlain, Virginie Ledoyen, Isild Le Besco, Benoît Magimel, Melvil Poupaud...) and work with the finest French actors (Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Pierre Arditi, Daniel Auteuil, Vincent Lindon, Fabrice Luchini...).

What may set Jacquot apart most of all from other contemporary filmmakers is his curiosity for the other arts and the way he uses the cinema to magnify them: be it literature (James's Wings of the Dove, Mishima's School of Flesh, Constant's Adolphe...), theatre (Elvire Jouvet 40, Par coeur, La Fausse Suivante...), music (Alfred Deller, Tosca, not to mention his upcoming staging of Massenet's Werther at the Bastille Opera in 2010), dance (Merce Cunningham), painting (Robert Motherwell), photography (Dominique Issermann), the art of Benoît Jacquot thrives on the other arts. These literary works in particular, such as Les Faux-Monnayeurs (2010), Gide's unfilmable "first novel", are not so much adapted as transposed; Jacquot embraces their style with a good deal of faithfulness and infidelities in order to approach the liberty of their authors: he turns their language, their words, into a rare object of desire and cinema.

Xavier Lardoux, author of Le Cinéma de Benoit Jacquot
(éditions PC - 2006)