As Hollywood became increasingly adept at grooming spiritless commercial successes, Diva raced into theaters with a natural grace, instantly reminding filmgoers of the breathless pleasure of unbroken talent. Dismissed on its release as a vacuous exercise in style, Jean-Jacques Beineix's debut film soon inspired heated dialectic on both sides of the Atlantic. Naysayers chided Beineix's work for being all glittering surface. But the film's champions caught glimpses of something altogether new, a movie with closer ties to opera than literature, all shot by a director with a dazzling sense of color, light, and rhythm.

Emerging from a solid background as assistant director to Rene Clement, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and even Jerry Lewis, Beineix avowed early on that the operatic form interested him far more than traditional narrative; indeed, his next two films (The Moon in the Gutter and Betty Blue) would be increasingly baroque experiments in pursuit of a cinematic equivalent. Assisted by Jean Van Hamme, he adapted Diva's screenplay from a novel of the same name by pop surrealist Delacorta (who continued the adventures of several of the film's characters in a half dozen other books). The plot is fairly standard action fare: Good guy unknowingly armed with potentially catastrophic information is pursued by evil guys who stop at nothing. But Beineix ups the ante with melodrama worthy of a punk Verdi: not one but two intertwined chases, set over a course strewn with deus ex machinae of varying sizes and shapes. Populating this wicked terrain are characters with requisite whimsy to execute the most preposterous maneuvers. Motivated by pure fancy, Diva's eccentrics are perfectly cast; in fact, many of the actors seemingly vanished without a trace following the film, as if the roles had been so right that further appearances could only be superfluous.

But just as one doesn't leave Tosca rhapsodizing about character development, one doesn't remember Diva for its sound if outlandish construction, but for its extraordinary imagery and style. Assisted by cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, Beineix floods every moment of his film with ravishing beauty. The director unabashedly revels in his giddy infatuation--with Paris, beautiful women, American kitsch, but mostly with cinema itself. Hitchcock and Welles are everywhere, as are Truffaut, Fellini, Godard, Antonioni--Beineix pays adoring tribute to each, and he's just beginning. Quotes from the entire history of movies are inserted seemingly for the pure joy of the images. Beineix directs like a lover who canŐt get enough of his mate, resulting in astonishing loveliness from every conceivable angle. A scene where a thug holds a stiletto to the hero's scrawny throat is shot as tenderly as the earlier close-ups of the diva's exquisite face; ribbons of destroyed audio tape float from the rafters of an abandoned garage, a pop meditation on the ravaging of art.

"I want to dream," Beineix told an interviewer in 1982, "and to find again the pleasure I had when I was younger, dreaming while watching people on the screen." To analyze this enormously influential film is to saddle a lovely fantasy with hidebound Freudian meaning. One of the great visual joyrides in the cinematic canon, Diva is best appreciated unbridled, dashing along at its own glorious, singular pace.
--Nancy Bauer

Cast

Frederic Andrei (Jules)
Roland Bertin (Weinstadt)
Richard Bohringer (Gorodish)
Gerard Darmon (The Spic)
Chantal Deruaz (Nadia)
Jacques Fabbri (Jean Saporta)
Patrick Floershei (Zatopek)
Thuy An Luu (Alba)
Jean-Jacques Moreau (Krantz)
Dominique Pinon (Le Cure)
Anny Romand (Paula)

With the participation of
Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez

Credits

Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Producer: Irene Silberman
Written by: Jean-Jacques Beineix & Jean Van Hamme
Based on the novel by: Delacorta
Director of photography: Philippe Rousselot
Editor: Monique Prim & Marie-Josephe Yoyotte
Music composed and directed by: Vladimir Cosma
Production designer: Hilton McConnico
Sound engineer: Jean-Pierre Ruh

About the transfer

Diva is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new digital transfer was created from a pristine 35mm low contrast print and the 16mm magnetic audio soundtrack.

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