URBAN GUIDE

Catapulted to worldwide fame as the director of Emmanuelle, the first quality erotic film, Just Jaeckin is today a tranquil artist dividing his time between Paris and the south and west coasts.

Photographer, racing driver, sculptor, painter, artistic director... and Emmanuelle's famous director is a record-breaker too: the film that revealed the sublime Sylvia Kristel showed for 13 years on the Champs-Elysées and has been seen by 500 million people around the world, while Ottawa's festival of French-language cinema announced that his feature film The Last Romantic Lover had been seen by more people in Canada than any other French film. Successes of which he is proud but that account for only a small part of his career: "I need to change lives every 10 years," he admits. Not a man to stick in the mud and rest on his laurels. "Being young in the Sixties wasn't always easy – at 18 I went to fight in Algeria – but it was an era that allowed endless possibilities. Everything was new, nothing compartmentalised. You could do any number of jobs, you just had to have ideas and energy." This epicurean believes "life is about challenges, projects". Such as this summer's exhibition that he's preparing at the Hôtel de Paris in Saint-Tropez (1), of his artworks and those of his wife, Anne. His career as a painter and sculptor is a great chapter in his life, following on from his meeting with Anne, who used to be a professional dancer and was a precursor of the fitness vogue in France. Her passion for sculpture awakened a slumbering talent in Just, so together they set up a studio in the pretty Breton town of Saint-Briac-sur-Mer and started creating. Her slender figures in movement, hands raised, faces detailed, and his sculptures and revisited photographs are displayed in their Paris gallery on Rue Guénégaud, Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Desire and freedom

This passion he has been able to indulge as he wishes thanks to one big asset: "The freedom the money from my films has given me. I decide anything I want, such as going off for a long skiing holiday to indulge my love of sport, or working non-stop for six months when inspiration has me in its grip. But don't be mistaken, I'm the laziest person on earth, I just obey my thoughts slavishly. I'm driven by my urges." Urges as the leitmotiv in his life. The urge of an artistic talent, an eye, an objectiveness, that enabled him to become a photographer for prestigious magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Paris Match. Then to work with Daniel Filipacchi on his girls' magazine Mademoiselle âge tendre. So Just became known and met people, which led to him shooting his first advertising films, including a campaign for Dim tights. Then came Emmanuelle: "Pure craziness, we were on the cusp of sexual liberation. The Women's Liberation Movement came down on me like a ton of bricks. Yet all my films deal with women's desire. No French actress would take the role. Sylvia Kristel trusted me and it launched her career." Quite a life story for the solitary child who "was so quiet they called me 'the mime'!". Has he changed deep down? His thoughts and passions, his love of women, are today expressed through his artworks that the Côte d'Azur's lucky inhabitants can discover this summer in Saint-Tropez's warm sunshine.