Diva

I saw Diva for the first time as a college student in a film class art theater marathon. I'd just finished the most boring excuse for a movie ever made (no offense to fans of "My Dinner with Andre") and went in to see Diva.

I was floored. The most beautiful example of "disastre deluxe" I've ever seen - everything is so rundown it's gorgeous. The music perfectly matches the whole film. The performances are not "realistic", but they are not meant to be.

This is obviously not a piece of cinema verite and shouldn't be reviewed as such. "Diva" is a 2 hour tour de force of cinema as experience. One of the finest films I've ever seen.

Diva is a movie that seems just as stunning and unique to me today as it did when I first saw it 20 years ago. One of those movies that you will remember forever.

On the surface, it's an exercise in pure style, combining exciting, "hip" visuals with great music (opera as well as some great atmospheric incidental music). But there are hundreds of movies like that. What makes Diva so memorable to me is the way it combines this stylish cinematic eye candy with a suspenseful plot, good acting, a touch of romance and sex, and even a smattering of philosophy (as the title character explains her reasons for not allowing her voice to be recorded, not to mention the immortal bread-buttering scene).

It sounds like a recipe for a boring, highly stylized "European" movie, but this is a film where the excitement never flags for a minute. One of the true gems of 80s cinema. As a friend said "If you wanted to be hip in the 80s, you had to have seen 'Liquid Sky', 'Repo Man' and 'Diva'". But even today, you should see it just because it's a great movie.

Diva was very influential on me as a young college student. Diva represented the archetype of a foreign art film. Sure it was new, strange, and unpredictable as Avante-Garde films tend to be. But it was more than that.

I've seen Diva three times -all in the 1980's. Twenty years later, what I remember most is not the plot and the message, but the rich texture of the film. As a viewer I was submersed in a new and different reality; one that was visually stunning, intriguing, and edgy. The submersion was achieved both visually and with the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack.

The colors man, the colors... Diva included many beautiful shot scenes with intense colors and dramatic lighting. There are several shots the stills of which could be turned into farmable artwork. At the time I was thinking they would make great dorm-room posters.

I think Diva has had a lasting influence on cinematography. You may have noticed that movies, TV shows and especially advertisements have moved to be very color intense. Dramatic lighting showing sharp contrasting hues, are the norm. Diva was the first film I can remember with rich color saturation made intentionally to make this type of artistic impression.

Another movie whose cinematography was likely influenced by Diva is Betty Blue (1986).

I watched 'Diva' the other day for the first time in at least fifteen years and it really held up. Long regarded as a pivotal 1980s art film, it has influenced many subsequent film makers, in advertising, and music videos. I'd say Ridley Scott was aware of it when he shot 'Blade Runner' and that opens up a whole can of worms. One could argue that 'Diva', though by no means science fiction, was a strong influence on William Gibson and other cyberpunk writers. Director Beineix is probably best know for the erotic classic 'Betty Blue', but this is a much more original and interesting movie. Beineix uses every trick in the book to make this movie visually stunning, but the plot is also strong, concerning the confusion between tapes of an Opera singer who abhors recordings, and evidence which can nail a corrupt cop. A young messenger (Frederic Andrei) gets caught up in this mistake and his life is soon at risk. Along the way he also comes to have an odd relationship with the singer in question (Wilhelmenia Fernandez), as well as a strange art student cum shoplifter (Thuy An Luu). Nothing is straightforward in 'Diva' but it is consistently watchable. Keep an eye out for Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinot as a cool looking punk thug, and also the outstanding motorcycle sequence. A very good movie. Recommended.

Today, most films have a structure so simple, you can abstract it in one mere sentence. Diva is not such a film, it has so much plot that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I'll begin with the two tapes the film is all about. Tape one is the bootleg record of the beautiful aria Ebben ne andro lontana from Alfredo Catalani's opera La Wally, taped during the recital of the famous opera singer Cynthia Hawkins. On tape, two Nadja, a prostitute, discloses who is the man behind a prostitution ring. The man who possesses these two tapes is Jules, a postman; tape one because he's the one who recorded it (for private use only, of course), tape two because Nadja slipped it into his bag just seconds before she's killed. Not really knowing why, Jules finds himself fleeing from the police and from the mob because of the latter tape - and since Cynthia Hawkins always refused to make tape recordings of her voice, two guys from the Taiwanese mafia, who sat just behind Jules when he recorded his bootleg, see their chance to make a fortune with it, try to get it and blackmail the diva.

Meanwhile, Jule becomes friends with Cynthia Hawkins when he brings her back a dress he stole after her recital (but not after having sex with a hooker wearing it) and they spend a day together. He also encounters Alba, a nice, glib girl with a talent for shoplifting (she developed a technique that makes you wish you're the guy behind the counter) and Gorodish, the man she lives with, two people who will help him a lot in the course of the film. All this is handled by director Jean-Jacques Beineix with virtuosity. But I'm only talking about the twisted plot here, whereas Diva is so much more.

It is its pop-art style, it is its unique genre-mix of Thriller and Romance, it is Jules' apartment, which looks like combination of a studio and a garage, it is its two killers who look like they escaped a Jeunet-film (and indeed Dominique Pinon, who plays one of the two killers, went on to star in Delicatessen, La cité des enfants perdus and Amélie), it is that wonderful chase scene where Jules drives down the stairs and takes the Métro with his moped, it is that absurdly funny scene with the blue Beethoven bust, it is Thuy An Luu, playing Alba as a cheerful girl that makes you wish you had a girlfriend like that, it is Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a real-life opera singer in her only film role, playing a wonderful Cynthia Hawkins (how I love that look she gives when someone reminds her of her age), it is Gorodish ingeniously solving two problems at once, it is its wonderful ending I will not reveal her with the perfect last words (Shhhh, listen...)... I could go on with this list forever. With its hilarious story, its beautiful images, its weird characters and its joyous direction, Diva could open the door to the cinema of the rest of the world for those whose Top 10 list consist only of films as Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Usual Suspects or The Godfather. It is a film I immensely love and could watch over and over again.