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| Director Jean-Jacques Beineix |
DIVA A France (117 mi) 1981 d: Jean-Jacques Beineix
Our world was changing at that time. It started to move faster, due to mass travel, commodities, and means of communication, which were, by the way, very, very archaic compared with what we have nowadays. Nevertheless, in ‘Diva’, the story dealt with that, which is artist, fans, artistic integrity regarding the production, endless reproduction, piracy, and technologies. In fact, there’s a phrase in the film which triggered a lot of problems with the producers, who wanted me to cut the line, which goes ‘It is up to industry to adapt to art, and not art to adapt to industry.’ It was naïve, maybe, but I still stick to that. —Jean-Jacques Beineix: The Hollywood Interview by Alex Simon, December 14, 2009
While Beineix made waves with a later film, Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986), it was this earlier film that really made a splash, coming at the beginning of François Mitterrand’s 14-year run as France’s President, the longest in the history of the country, and the first left-wing Socialist politician to assume the presidency in the modern era. With a change to a more progressive social agenda, French cinema went through its own transformation. Just as Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer helped revitalize the French New Wave in the 60’s, inspiring a new generation of filmmakers, this film helped usher in a new style in the 80’s known as Cinéma du Look, placing a much greater emphasis on visual impact over content, with Beineix, along with Léos Carax’s Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986), and The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991) introducing dramatic, often colorful lighting, elaborate camera moves, and powerful use of music, a short-lived yet enduring aesthetic that drew its inspiration from commercials and music videos, exuding a stylistic playfulness that’s more reminiscent of New Hollywood than New Wave. Putting the film in context, it was released just after Truffaut’s THE LAST METRO (1980), a film that started a lifelong rift between two great French directors that would never be resolved, Truffaut vs. Godard. Beineix was not exactly a prodigy, 34 years of age when he directed it, toiling for years as an assistant director, yet the film speaks to a youthful mindset, replacing the social realist aesthetic of the 70’s. Initially met with a disastrous reception by the French critics, most notably those of Cahiers du Cinéma, with infamous editor/critic Serge Daney describing the style as “an advertising aesthetic,” yet it’s easily the most dramatic debut in years. The film was praised in America, championed by the likes of Frederic Jameson, who called it “the first French postmodernist film,” J. Hoberman, “The most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year,” and Pauline Kael, “It’s a glittering toy of a movie by a director who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn’t take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience.” It’s hard not to notice just how dramatically the look and style of films changed between the 70’s and 80’s, not only in France but in world cinema, reflecting the rapid advance in print technology, no longer relying upon faded copies, while also reflecting the influence of music videos, inspired by fashion, animation, punk, design, and the music itself that soon influenced mainstream cinema. MTV was officially launched just months after this film was released, where this was the first French film to embrace all the different influences of the time to create a totally new look. After all the acclaim the film received in America, including a standing ovation at the Toronto Film Festival, it subsequently became massively successful in France, where over 2 million people saw it in theaters, soon finding a cult following around the world. First and foremost, this is obviously the creation of someone who adores the art of film, with the super-stylish vision of the director drawing upon the entire history of cinema in creating a powerful aesthetic that dazzles with a visual brilliance, offering sweeping point-of-view shots, accentuating the power of the spectacle, where the art direction truly stands out, as it’s really a celebration of art and its subversive power. Thrown together in a rebellious collage of lowbrow and highbrow culture, the film implements a curious combination of pop art with graphic action and film noir, packaged as something glamorous and seductive, while emphasizing strong color filters and impressionistic splashes of light, breaking out in bright, comic book colors.
Using striking imagery to portray social outsiders who express their alienation from society, conveying a heightened sense of reality, the stylized design and exaggerated camera movements make this an intensely subjective experience, setting a tone that would produce other notable psychological thrillers of the 80’s like Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple (1984), Peter Weir’s WITNESS (1985), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985), David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET (1986), Michael Mann’s MANHUNTER (1986), Roger Donaldson’s NO WAY OUT (1987), and Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm (1989). Adapting Daniel Odier’s 1979 crime novel by the same name set in Paris, published under the pseudonym Delacorta, the film played for over a year in some cinemas, winning four French César Awards, including Best First Film, Best Music, Best Sound, and Best Cinematography by Philippe Rousselot, who would go on to win an Oscar for Robert Redford’s A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT (1992). Bearing some resemblance to Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1959), each exploring the theme of the female image in modern culture, with an affection for Hollywood cinema and the gangster genre, both using a contemporary, hyper-realist style, riding a wave of aesthetic freedom and personal expression, featuring a seemingly spontaneous relationship between a French man and an American woman. Rooted in violence and ambiguity, both films excel in a free expression of art, where a contemporary stylishness drives and supplants the realist aspects of the genre. Like The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf), Paris is a protagonist in this film, the arteries through which every image and action occurs, where people, streets, monuments, metro and railway stations, restaurants, brasseries, and hotels are on full display, providing a hyper-realistic exaltation that exudes a different kind of life force, making this enormously fun and unpredictable. This film also places an emphasis on artificially constructed spaces, like the opera house, hotel rooms, and lofts that are cluttered with objects displaying various brand names, situated in empty, gargantuan spaces. While many believe this is a style over substance film, a superficial gloss under the guise of art, that viewpoint seems to miss the point, as this is a rare gem that has both style and substance to spare in a wildly exhilarating ride, becoming a unique genre-mix of thriller and romance, offering an inventive charm and quirky personality that simply doesn’t exist in other films, a predecessor to Olivier Assayas, Michael Mann, and Wong Kar-wai, also Tom Tykwer’s equally fascinating, adrenaline-laced Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998), all with the capacity to enthrall audiences. While the narrative is overly convoluted, with a B-movie subplot, and the characters poorly developed, they are memorable nonetheless, a diverse set of cool characters, though each appears isolated, existing in their own world, with no real social contacts, suggesting an avant-garde, mosaic possibility for conceptualizing the human psyche. There is a complex intersection of two differing worlds, the utterly sublime beauty of opera and the dark and seedy Parisian underworld, the sacred and the profane, offering an almost surreal contrast of such distinctively different realms, literally transporting viewers into domains they are rarely exposed to, becoming a brilliantly choreographed, sensuously immersive experience.
The unexpected surprise is real opera singer Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez (her sole film appearance) as the eponymous diva Cynthia Hawkins, a high priestess black American opera singer whose irrepressible beauty matches her divine soprano voice, seen at the outset singing an aria (relatively obscure until made famous by this film) from Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally, a 1892 opera set in the mountains of Switzerland that features a memorable operatic death in which the heroine throws herself into an avalanche, which is seldom performed, partly because of the difficulty of staging that scene, but this principal aria is now sung frequently as it exquisitely expresses such a vast array of emotions, Wilhelmenina Wiggins Fernandez - La Wally (extrait de "Diva ... YouTube (4:16). A little known fact is that the great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who considered Catalani the finest Italian composer of his generation, named his daughter Wally after the heroine of the work, who then went on to marry virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and even had a small speaking role in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989. Opening a thriller with 4-minutes of opera is a ballsy move, facing a lot of flak from his producers for that, yet there is intrigue surrounding the performance, as it’s being secretly recorded by Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a moped-driving (though to be correct, a mobylette) postal courier in Paris, and a devoted fan who is hopelessly infatuated, causing scandalous headlines when it’s also revealed that he stole the gown she was wearing hanging in her backstage dressing room. It’s only later divulgled that Ms. Hawkins has never been recorded and will only perform live concerts, valuing artistic integrity and the sanctity between the audience and the performer, believing her performances are the only authentic experience of her art. Accordingly, when word gets out that there’s a high-quality bootleg tape of her in concert, the criminal underworld is aswirl trying to get their hands on it. Simultaneously, a former prostitute named Nadia drops a tape cassette into the bag of Jules just moments before she is gunned down on the streets of Paris, chased by two hired assassins known as The West Indian and The Priest, the thuggishly sinister Gérard Darman and Dominique Pinon. The two tapes are intrinsically linked, yet get mixed up, with a furious network of Parisian criminal figures in hot pursuit, wanting all evidence eliminated, including the postman. Jules, who is at the center of this controversy, knows nothing about any of this, so when he rather innocently witnesses a theft in a record store, he follows the attractive young French-Vietnamese perpetrator out of the store, Alba (Thuy An Luu), commending her for the originality of such a brazenly ingenious act, hiding it in her portfolio of naked, self-portrait photographs, only to discover she has a talent for shoplifting. When they retreat back to his cluttered apartment, it looks like a combination of industrial loft and a car-wreck-strewn warehouse garage, with some eye-popping, mural-sized artworks on the walls, giving it an utterly distinctive look that she thinks is pretty gloomy, but he describes as “A monument to disaster…deluxe style!” Expressing an interest in the music played, he allows her to borrow the tape, which is fortunate, as his place is ransacked shortly afterwards by thugs searching for the missing tape slipped into his bag, which reportedly exposes the viciously corrupt police commissioner (Jacques Fabbri) as the man behind a lucrative narcotics, sex-trade, and prostitute operation, which he is willing to protect at all costs. Meanwhile, there is a furious underground bidding war for the Hawkins tape, something she describes as a violation, “a rape.”
After seeing all the news reports about the stolen gown, Jules goes to visit Hawkins in her luxury hotel begging for forgiveness, returning the dress along with a bouquet of flowers, acknowledging he’s a huge fan, providing meticulous detail about some of her concerts, which takes her aback, and just as improbably, after being infuriated by his actions, she takes a liking to him, finding him pleasant company and easy to hang out with. Yet the real surprise is they actually establish a sense of intimacy, spending the night, though not sexually (she’s probably twice his age), where he’s there in the morning for breakfast in the room and to hear her rehearse, a rare treat not offered to anyone else. The scene of the film is a refined walk through the Tuileries Garden set to the delicate music composed by Vladimir Cosma, sounding like the gentleness of Erik Satie’s solo piano work, where she gracefully walks under the shade of a white parasol, and while this is a wordless sequence, the poetically expressed tenderness is simply ethereal, Vladimir Cosma - Promenade Sentimentale (extrait de "Diva") YouTube (2:54). The stylish elegance of her hotel room mirrors the chic setting of the huge cavernous space in the loft of Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), Alba’s contemplative, Zen-like partner in crime that she refers to as “The Lone Ranger,” which may be a comment on their existing relationship and how isolated they appear to be, where she can be seen roller skating around the empty premises, marked by an undulating neon blue liquid wave motion machine that tips up and down like a seesaw, while he meditates to the sounds of new age music, Gorodish (Remastered) YouTube (3:04). When Jules hears that Cynthia is being blackmailed for a pirated recording that he made, his heart sinks, yet she affirms her principles, refusing to give in, informing them “Commerce should adapt to art, not art to commerce.” But this realization puts him in the crosshairs of danger, sending him out into a Parisian dreamscape, where the interaction of background settings becomes just as unnerving as the tension between characters, turning into a harrowing subterranean Paris Metro chase scene as Jules first runs from the cops, DIva- Chase Scene (Full Version) YouTube (4:26), and then the hired assassins, evoking a palpable sense of fear and panic as he’s caught up in an unrelenting nightmare, which leads to improbable twists and turns, yet they are elegantly realized. Gorodish, the central figure in a series of six novels, is an elusive figure who eventually joins the fray, apparently having his own underworld connections, but he is so laid-back and detached that he subverts the idea of a conventional thriller hero, yet it’s like he’s playing a chess game, always two or three steps ahead of the bad guys. Jules is hardly innocent, as it was his crime that sets the action in motion, yet he projects innocence, helplessly caught up in a brutal cesspool of criminality. Beineix blends pop art décors, offbeat locations, selective color schemes and idiosyncratic compositions, which are assertively used to create a fantasy world that is a diversion from typical crime movie realism, which is itself a stylization from the pulp thriller, accenting the multiplicity of human experience and also its fragility, yet it’s the operatic dimension he employs that really stands out. When compared to the graphic depictions of blood, guts, and violence that dominate movie screens today, unearthing this film is a revelation.
