'Diva' Rediviva
Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal thriller comes back to life

In the U.S., Jean-Jacques Beineix’s debut film, Diva – now resurrected in a new print for a two-week run at the Nuart – continues to overshadow all his subsequent work, more than 25 years after its American release.

Based on a novel by pseudonymous French writer Delacorta, this thriller revolves around Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a winsome young Parisian postman, who is devoted to the work of opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). Unfortunately, Hawkins refuses to record, so Jules, a bit of a tech head, smuggles a Nagra into her latest concert. From his third-row-center seat, he makes a near-perfect recording of Hawkins’s breathtaking performance of the aria from Catalani’s opera La Wally. (To judge by the film, this is a one-selection, five-minute concert. Luckily, things move swiftly enough that the audience never notices.)

The recording is sheerly for Jules’s personal pleasure; he has no interest in selling it. But two factors complicate matters: Two sinister Taiwanese bootleggers sitting nearby see that he’s taping; and, by coincidence, a prostitute – about to blow the whistle on the “white slavery” syndicate from which she has escaped – stashes a cassette of her testimony into the bag on Jules’s moped, right before getting rubbed out.

Jules doesn’t realize this, meaning that he completely misinterprets various demands for “the tape.” After his loft – a really fabulous pad, decorated with wrecked cars – is ransacked, he goes on the lam, hiding out with a Vietnamese teenage shoplifter named Alba (Thuy An Luu) and her protector, Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), a mysterious artist/mensch with a Zen bent. This unlikely duo lives in an even more fabulous loft, the tasteful austerity of which is the opposite of Jules’s cluttered pad.

As the Taiwanese, the syndicate thugs, and the cops all pursue Jules – and Jules, in a different sense, pursues Hawkins – Gorodish will inevitably be called upon to fix everything up.

You could drive all of Jules’s wrecked cars through the plot holes in Diva and still have room for an 18-wheeler, but, if you’re concentrating on that, you’re missing the point. Beineix has constructed a cinematic amusement park ride.

Or at least that’s how it seemed in 1982. A few years later, in a review of one of his later movies, I wrote that Diva was “as surfacy as they come, but the surface was so much fun that it was easy to ignore the film’s plot holes and deliberate shallowness.” Compared to French action films of more recent vintage, however, Diva seems almost deep and contemplative.

It’s still dazzlingly entertaining, but some of its impact – particularly for viewers who have never seen it before – may be blunted … ironically enough, by the fruits of its success.

That is, Diva was a real breakthrough at the time. There had always been French genre films, but, during the ’70s, Americans primarily had access only to stuff in the mode of the genuinely deep thrillers of Claude Chabrol or the comic fluff of Claude Lelouch. Diva dragged – or, more accurately, blasted – French action film into a new era.

There is no question that it was an inspiration for the young Luc Besson, whose first major film, Subway (released in 1985, when Besson was only 25), came across as a blatant Beineix imitation (including the casting of the by-then-iconic Bohringer). Having assumed Beineix’s mantle, Besson went increasingly Hollywood with La Femme Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994), and The Fifth Element (1997). More importantly, he became, in a sense, the entire French action film industry, writing and/or producing dozens of French and English-language movies.

But what happened to Beineix?

Despite the presumably offputting experience of having been, during his apprentice days, second assistant director on Jerry Lewis’s never-released catastrophe The Day the Clown Cried, he was eager to work with Hollywood. “It is not my fault if my language was not successful enough to be the language of the world!” he told me in an interview in the ’80s. “I want to be a member of the hugest community in the world, which is English-speaking, so I can have the privilege to share the audience and market that this offers to a picture.” But it never happened. And his French career faltered as well.

His followup to Diva was The Moon in the Gutter (1983), an adaptation of a pulp novel by American writer David Goodis (whose Down There had famously been the source for Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player). Despite the presence of big names Gérard Depardieu and Nastassja Kinski, it didn’t duplicate Diva’s success and was excoriated by many critics as a muddled exercise in style. His 1986 Betty Blue was better received, but none of his subsequent features were even distributed in the U.S. He switched to making TV documentaries, most notably “Locked-In Syndrome,” a chronicle of the final days of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subject of Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which coincidentally also opens this week. (See feature on page 22 and review on page 24. Yes, this issue is a regular Schnabelfest.)

Diva’s influence stretched beyond France: You can see its traces in (for a starter) America and Hong Kong. Dominique Pinon – who later became a central comic player in all of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films – made his feature debut here as one of the thugs, a surly punk who only speaks to say that he hates things. One of the film’s most memorable images, used in advertising art and on the soundtrack cover, was Pinon in a black leather jacket and shades. He looks quite exactly like a scrawny version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (1984); and the scene in which Pinon stalks Jules through a bowling alley/arcade should put to rest any question as to whether James Cameron ever saw Diva.

All of which may be tangential to the central point – Diva remains terrific after all this time. The visuals are beautifully composed; the action scenes – including a famous motorcycle chase in the subway – still work; and the performances are all spot-on, except for some rough spots from Wiggins (who never appeared in another movie). And Vladimir Cosma’s score – ranging from jagged electric guitar riffs to the world’s best Erik Satie imitation – is every bit as effective as Beineix’s use of the Catalani aria.