Pros: An innovative and entertaining film delivering stylish, sumptuous images and clever plot twists
Cons: Viewer must have tolerance for subtitles
The Bottom Line: This is a marvelous film that defies genre categorization. It delivers stylish images, intelligent innovation, and solid entertainment.
Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.
Occasionally, a film is produced that is so unique in its style as to defy categorization in a genre – “a film without a genre” (sort of like “the man without a country”). Examples that come to mind include Carl Dreyer’s La Passion De Jeanne D’Arc, Luis Buñuel’s L’Age D’Or and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. Innovativeness, however, does not by itself ensure greatness or, at least, greatness in the eyes of every viewer. An innovative approach may succeed for one viewer and fail miserably for another. I, for example, find Dreyer’s La Passion De Jeanne D’Arc an extraordinarily moving film but Godard’s Weekend utterly boring, with far too few rewards or insights for a two hour investment, despite its creatively unconventional approach. Innovation is genius only when it works!
Jean Jacques Beineix’s Diva exhibits another kind of innovativeness altogether. Rather than being a film without a genre, this is a “film of many genres!” Part mystery, part action film, part romantic comedy, part suspense story, part high culture and part punk -- Diva is something of a genre collage. Packed with plot twists, this film also continuously slips its genre. With all of this, however, Diva studiously avoids taking any of its genres too terribly seriously, preferring to have a bit of fun with all of them.
Despite flitting and darting amongst genres, however, the film exhibits two constants from beginning to end: it is one-hundred percent Parisian in its atmosphere and utterly stylish and stunning in its visual impact. Set in a highly stylized Paris, one shot after another presents surreal images of noiresque urban cityscapes and interiors, dizzying chase scenes, resplendent colors, and a marvelous variety of strange characters with comic book-like countenances. There’s a cute Vietnamese girl, a skin-head cop, and Asian corporate thugs in sun glasses. Sharply contrasting images are juxtaposed against one another, such as an ornamented opera hall where the most formal social graces are observed, followed by a punk-deco apartment where the occupants glide around on roller skates, all interspersed with the violence of the mean city streets . Such contrasts are further reinforced by the musical score. We hear the diva brilliantly performing a sumptuous aria from Catalani’s opera “La Wally”, street noises of mopeds, speeding cars, and gun shots, and the soft, lyrical piano music of a punk guru.
The story’s central protagonist is Jules (Frederic Andrei), a moped courier, who is an adoring fan of a talented black American opera star, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). Hawkins has never permitted a recording to be made of her voice – either live or in the studio. Jules is able to make surreptitiously a high quality tape of her Paris performance, which he intends only for his personal enjoyment. Two thugs from an Asian recording company have gotten wind, however, of the existence of Jules’s recording and are after it so that they can then blackmail the diva into agreeing to an exclusive recording contract with their outfit. Meanwhile, a woman who possesses evidence of corruption involving the police commissioner and police officers is killed by the dirty cops outside a station, but not before slipping a tape with the evidence into Jules’s moped sidebag. Jules is thus unknowingly in possession of two valuable tapes and will inevitably be pursued by two separate pairs of villainous men – the record company copyright pirates and the bad cops. Jules enlists the aid of two new friends – a Vietnamese girl, Alba (Thuy An Luu), who he met after observing her shop-lifting a record from a record store, and her boyfriend, Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), a new wave, spiritual guru kind of a guy.
Beineix’s pacing for this film is excellent, building like Ravel’s Bolero from slow and lyrical to intensely frenetic. There is a chase scene through the Parisian subway system that is particularly well-staged and memorable. Diva, released in 1981, was the first film for Beineix. It is in color – extraordinary color, in fact – with English subtitles and a running time of 123 min.
By in large, Diva is not my personal favorite type of movie. I tend more toward films that either deliver a profound message, are emotionally wrenching, or provoke rock-your-socks laughter. Diva does none of these things. Yet, what it does do, it does better than just about any other film. It is highly entertaining! Better still, it is entertaining in a manner that is relentlessly stylish, intelligent, and original. It is my highest compliment to assign this film five stars despite it not being my type of film. It succeeds so effectively on its own unique terms as to provide a viewing experience that is both fresh and highly enjoyable.
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