Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Starring: Frédéric Andréi, Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, Richard Bohringer, Thuy An Luu, Dominique Pinon
A cult movie that was also a mainstream hit seems like an oxymoron, but that was just the case with Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 directorial debut Diva. Adapted from a novel by Daniel Odier, Diva was far from the standard crime thriller its producers expected Beineix to deliver. Instead the director fashioned a pop art thriller, one whose plot and character relationships were secondary to its glossy images. Dumped into a single Paris cinema, Diva nonetheless grew a devoted audience in the French capital, enough to convince its producers to play it at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was lauded by North American critics. Released wide off the back of such acclaim, Diva was a huge hit in France and also became one of the biggest foreign language movies to ever release in the US.
The film's narrative is split into two overlapping subplots, both concerning recordings and the various characters who wish to take possession of them. Young postman and opera buff Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is obsessed with Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Fernandez), a beautiful American soprano who refuses to cut records, insisting that she only be heard live. Sneaking a sophisticated tape recorder into an opera house, Jules makes a high quality recording of Cynthia's performance (he also steals her gown from her dressing room). Unbeknownst to Jules, a pair of Taiwanese mobsters are aware of the recording he made, and wish to get their hands on it to blackmail Cynthia into recording for their label.
The second recording is made by a prostitute and incriminates a crooked cop, Saporta (Jacques Fabbri), who is the head of a major drug and trafficking ring. The tape falls into Jules' unwitting possession when the prostitute hides it in his saddle bag before she is killed by a pair of hoods working for Saporta, played by Gérard Darmon and Dominique Pinon, the latter making his debut and resembling a Gerry Anderson puppet brought to life.
A lover of music that is almost out of his reach, Jules is a spiritual cousin of the jazz buff played by François Cluzet in Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight. But Jules' interest in Cynthia is also romantic, and upon returning her gown out of guilt he improbably convinces her to go on a date. The unlikely relationship between the postman and the diva is incongruous with the film's '80s setting, a throwback to movies of a more innocent era, where protagonists fell in love instantly and such matters as class and age gaps weren't considered. It's an element that likely made Diva feel dated on its release, but which now gives it a timeless quality. The film's other relationship, that between thirtysomething bohemian weirdo photographer Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) and his teenage "model" Alba (Thuy An Luu), has however, aged like milk.
More central to the source novel, the figure of Gorodish is a confusing addition here. How he comes into Jules' life is the product of some awkward plot machinations, and in the film's final act he improbably morphs from a zoned-out wastrel into a criminal mastermind, all for the sake of wrapping up the plot.
Diva's pieces may not all fit together, but it's a movie with several scenes and many images that linger in the mind, none more so than its moped chase down into the depths of the Paris metro with its lurid red walls. For Beineix, the plot is simply a means of getting from one shiny set-piece to another.
The superficiality of Diva's plot and characters turned off the French critics who initially failed to connect with the film. It arrived at a time when the energy of the New Wave had given way to a French cinema of talky prestige dramas, and critics weren't ready for a movie that resembled a comic book brought to life. Beineix had in fact enlisted a comic book writer, Jean Van Hammem, to help him adapt the novel, which might explain why some of the scenes don't transition in a traditional sense but rather feel like we've turned a page without realising the two pages that should follow are stuck together. Both Jules and Gorodish live in lofts adorned with elaborate pop art murals that give them the appearance of living inside giant comic books. Striking at the time, the idea of a protagonist living in a loft would quickly become one of the great clichés of '80s cinema.
With its unrepentant favouring of style over substance, Diva ushered in the era of the "cinema du look," a series of French movies that took their cues from advertising, music videos and comic books. Such films have since become uncomfortably dated largely due to their tone deaf sexual politics (none more so than Beineix's other great hit, Betty Blue), but it's their commitment to creating striking images that makes them so interesting to now return to. The films of the cinema du look now stand alongside '60s Italian horror movies and '70s German melodramas as some of the most gorgeous examples of pop art to emerge from 20th century European cinema.
Diva is on UK 4K UHD and bluray now.