Diva

DIVA

France, 1981

Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix

Production: Les Films Galaxie/Greenwich Film Production/Antenne 2; color, 35mm; running time: 117 minutes; some prints are 123 minutes. Filmed on location in Paris and Normandy (Gatteville Lighthouse).

Producer: Irene Silberman; screenplay: Beineix and Jean Van Hamme, from the novel by Delacorta; photography: Philippe Rousselot; editors: Monique Prim, Marie-Josephe Yoyotte; sound: Jean-Pierre Ruh; art director: Hilton McConnico; production designer: Ully Pickard; costume design: Claire Fraisse; music: Vladimir Cosma, with arias by Alfredo Catalini ("Ebben? . . . Ne andrò lontanno" from La Wally ) and Charles Gounod ("Ave Maria").

Cast: Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez ( Cynthia Hawkins ); Frédéric Andréi ( Jules ); Richard Bohringer ( Gorodish ); An Luu Thuy ( Alba ); Jacques Fabbri ( Jean Saporta ); Anny Romand ( Paula ); Patrick Floersheim ( Zatopek ); Gerard Darmon ( L'Antillais ); Dominique Pinon ( Le curé )

Awards: César Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Music, Best New Director and Best Sound, 1982; National Society of Film Critics (USA) Award for Best Cinematography, 1982.

Publications

Script:

Beineix, Jean-Jacques, Diva (scenario), in Avant-Scène Cinéma (Paris), December 1991.

Books:

Parent, Denis, et al., Jean-Jacques Beineix, version originale , Paris, 1989.

Powrie, Phil, French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity , Oxford, 1997.

Articles:

Kelly, Ernece B., " Diva : High Tech Sexual Politics," in Jump Cut (Berkeley), 1984.

Interview in Film Comment (New York), February 1987.

Hagen, W.M., "Performance Space in Diva," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), 1988.

Peary, "A Tough Act to Follow," in American Film (Hollywood), January 1990.

Jameson, Frederick, " Diva and French Socialism," in Signatures of the Visible , New York, 1992.

Yervasi, Carina L., "Capturing the Elusive Representations in Beineix's Diva ," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), 1993.

Olivier, Bert, "No Recording Please! This Is Art. Or: What Do Cynthia Hawkins and Walter Benjamin Have in Common (Not)?" in South African Journal of Philosophy , February 1996.

* * *

Diva was welcomed internationally as an early crest of a French Newer Wave and a major work by a first-time director. Though not truly radical either politically or stylistically—say, in the manner of such "old" New Wavers as Godard or Rivette—it had a hip 1980s sensibility that overlay its indebtedness to the lighter sort of Alfred Hitchcock thriller, in which an innocent but not quite guiltless person becomes the target of an international conspiracy. In contrast to the equally Hitchcockian murder-among-the-haute-bourgeoisie thrillers of Claude Chabrol, Diva was more of a pop entertainment, its hero a moped-riding postal worker who lives in a really cool industrial space, and one of the villains is a punk of the shaven-head-and-sunglasses variety. Moreover, the film featured multiracial casting and a savvy mix of very different kinds of music, from Italian opera to technopop and New Age. Director Jean-Jacques Beineix was not exactly a prodigy—he was 35 and a veteran assistant director when it was released—but Diva , if somewhat of a period piece today, remains brimful of youthful energy.

Beineix's script asks the viewer to accept an exceedingly unlikely premise. It is not so much that a world-class operatic soprano believes so strongly in the power and integrity of live performance that she refuses to make recordings and has never even heard her own voice— but that no one besides the film's young hero has ever smuggled a high-quality tape recorder into a concert hall to make an illicit tape of her. The whole plot hinges upon this presumption, beginning with the sinister attempts of two Taiwanese record pirates sitting behind Jules at the concert to get the tape by any means possible. To be sure, if one goes beyond the literal and the expedient (to set the plot in motion), there is much that is fascinating about this situation: for example, the spectacle of a man trying to capture the "essence" of a woman by robbing her, even "violating" her as the diva later claims; or the paradox that the sacred act of live performance, the aura of the glorious moment, can be represented by the endlessly reproducible medium of cinema.

The other moment that sets the plot in motion is the sort of coincidence common among thrillers: a woman about to be stabbed by a member of an international drug and prostitution ring slips an incriminating tape into Jules' moped bag. The presence of two tapes and two sets of criminals leads to the sort of massive confusion that can only be resolved by a final shootout. But several factors make Diva fresher than most conventional thrillers, and more complex than other hits of its era.