Revisiting Diva

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Diva may have been the first foreign-language film I ever saw. I don't remember well enough to say for sure, but I do recall that it shared space with The Tin Drum and Mephisto on my hometown video store's shelf of foreign films. (When I say shelf, I mean that literally — the entire collection amounted to less than a dozen videotapes.) When I was sixteen, Diva's vision of a Parisian mailman who rides around the city on a motorbike, chased by thugs and hanging out with a waif who shoplifts jazz records, seemed impossibly hip. Just re-released in a new print by Rialto Pictures, it now seems slow and sedate compared to Paul Greengrass and Tony Scott's recent films.

In the '80s, Jean-Jacques Beineix was lumped in with Luc Besson and Leos Carax as one of the creators of the 'cinéma du look.' Diva had the misfortune of being ahead of its time for about six months, until MTV went on the air. Coincidentally, Blade Runner, made around the same time, is also being re-released now. The two films share several points of contact, especially a nostalgia for film noir and an indulgence in style that manifests itself in blue-tinged cinematography and impossibly detailed production design.

After initial failure, Blade Runner has gone down as a classic; Diva is largely a footnote in French cinema history. Yet Ridley Scott was essentially an Anglo proponent of the 'cinéma du look'; he just happened to be working from better source material and with more talented collaborators. Diva's 'exercise in style' sensibility still has its merits — the motorbike subway chase scene is exhilarating, and the characters' lofts are spaces to luxuriate in — but as a narrative, its crime story seems unwieldy and out of place. (With Collateral and Miami Vice, Michael Mann has finally accomplished what Beineix and Besson had often set out to do.) I'd rather see a film about the same people and places in which they sat around smoking cigarettes, taking nude photos and talking about opera rather than throwing awls at each other and tossing thugs down elevator shafts.

Diva has often been cited as a case of style over substance, but now that twenty-six years have passed, it's clear that Beineix had something on his mind: the conversion of art, as represented by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins' refusal to record her voice, into a commodity. The late French critic Serge Daney castigated Diva as an example of the influence of advertising upon cinema, but both media have moved on since 1981. The 'cinema du look' finally produced a masterpiece, Leos Carax's 1991 Les Amants de Pont-Neuf, but by that time, Beineix's career had entered free fall. Luc Besson figured out how to beat Hollywood at its own game; Beineix's films could never pass for American genre fare in multiplexes, as Besson's The Fifth Element did. His follow-up to Diva, The Man in the Gutter, was an interesting, ambitious failure that resembles Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle and early '80s Francis Ford Coppola. I haven't seen any of Beineix's subsequent films; few Americans have.

Diva doesn't fit comfortably into the 'classic French film revival' slot that Rialto has created so successfully for itself. I don't think the middle-aged or elderly crowd that supports Jean-Pierre Melville re-releases would go for it, and I'm not sure that contemporary teenagers would find anything attractive about its quasi-punk posturing. But I'm thankful for the opportunity to test whether this vision that helped define the '80s has stood the test of time. — Steve Erickson

The Screengrab : collateral

Revisiting Diva