Diva (1981)

About

“A brilliant film, a visual extravaganza…I think the real subject of Diva is the director’s joy in making it…It’s pure exhilaration.” — Roger Ebert

“Every shot seems to have a shaft of wit. It’s Welles romanticized, gift-wrapped. It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.” — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

SYNOPSIS

Heralding the arrival of the neo-New Wave Cinéma du look movement in its native France, director Jean-Jacques Beineix burst onto the scene with a debut that seemed determined to jolt film culture awake. Hotly debated upon release, with some French critics dismissing it as little more than stylish “applied advertising,” Diva found passionate defenders in American critics like Roger Ebert, J. Hoberman, and Pauline Kael, who recognized in it something rarer: a pop thriller of genuine formal invention. When young courier Jules (Frédéric Andréi) illegally records the voice of the opera singer he worships, he soon finds himself pursued by cops, criminals, and music pirates alike, swept into a neon-lit labyrinth of stolen tapes, romantic obsession, and urban intrigue. Film critic Dave Kehr perceptively noted Beineix’s debt to the color experimentation of Jean-Luc Godard and the playful narrative machinery of Jacques Rivette, but only Beineix could transform such deliciously pulp material into one of the defining cult sensations of 1980s French cinema.