Diva (12) |Home Ents Review

It is always good to be able to return to an epochal movie and see it looking better than ever. This 4K restoration gives you the chance to see what all the fuss was about when Diva came out in 1981. 

Jules (Andréi) is an opera-obsessed postal courier who zips around Paris on his ‘mobilette’ or moped. Outside a railway station, a dying woman bumps into him, surreptitiously slipping him a tape identifying her killer. Jules’s head is in the clouds because he has just seen a performance by American opera star Cynthia Hawkins (Wiggins Fernandez). He has surreptitiously recorded the concert, even though Hawkins’ diva status is based on the fact that she will not allow her voice to be recorded. 

Soon, a weird killer duo, the police and ruthless Taiwanese record industry thugs are chasing Jules to retrieve one or other of the tapes. Meanwhile, he strikes up an odd-couple relationship with Cynthia as well as with another odd couple, kooky jailbait Alba (Luu) and her wiser, older male mentor – ahem and indeed ouch! – Gorodish (Bohringer). 

Diva kickstarted the youth driven ‘cinéma du look’ movement and helped define French cool in the 1980s. Taking a maximalist and syncretic approach, it mixes up all sorts of music styles (thanks to composer Vladimir Cosma); and blends several film styles too thanks to cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, who bathes proceedings in a cool blue hue.

The film’s striking visuals and fashion-forward aesthetic anticipated music videos and pop culture, even if they also owed a visual debt to the operatic tone of popular Italian cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s. 

Messed up but very 80s sexual politics to one side, Diva is a perfectly good thriller. It is worth a watch – or even a rewatch – because it caused such a kerfuffle when it came out. If it now merely looks “very cool and 80s” with its moments of deep blue calm, it is worth remembering that the likes of Michael Mann and Luc Besson hadn’t delved into saturated colour when Diva first hit the big screen. Of course, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo were just in the past, but it is in breaking with the gritty realist tradition of French thrillers that Diva truly stands out. 

The film is less coloured and bright than I remembered – perhaps because the intervening decades have served up so much fare that has been influenced by Diva. It is also fair to say that the plot is pretty fluffy – but no more so than some Italian gialli films.