PAULINE KAEL ON DIVA

The French romantic thriller “Diva” dashes along with a pell-mell gracefulness, and it doesn’t take long to see that the images and visual gags and homages all fit together and reverberate back and forth. It’s a glittering toy of a movie, like “Touch of Evil”, “The Stunt Man” or “Zazie Dans le Métro”. This one is by a new director, Jean-Jacques Beineix (pronounced simply Ben-ex, with the stress on the second syllable), 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. Now thirty-five, Beineix has been working as an assistant director to other directors for ten years; he begins his own directing career as a Euro-disco entertainer with a fabulous camera technique. The movie doesn’t have the purity of conception of those other toys. It isn’t quite in their class, and though you may come out of it with some of the same exhilaration, it isn’t really memorable. But the images are so smooth yet so tricky and hip that Beineix might be Carol Reed reborn with a Mohawk haircut.

The diva of the title is an awesomely beautiful black American soprano called Cynthia Hawkins (and played by the American Wilhelmenia Fernandez), who inspires a fanatic following, like that of Maria Callas. But the glorious Cynthia has a major eccentricity: she refuses to make recordings, because she wants the public to have the full experience of a singer’s presence. Jules, the eighteen-year-old hero (Frédéric Andrei), a skinny young postal messenger in Paris, with an official cap that’s too big for his face, is, perhaps, Cynthia’s most dedicated fan. He rides his motorbike all way to Munich and other cities she performs in, and when she gives a concert in Paris he sneaks his Nagra tape machine in and makes a recording – he wants to be able to listen to her at home. Her voice is thrilling in the hushed, expectant atmosphere; her off-the-shoulder, satin gown reveals a creamy brown arm, and her lips push out toward us as she articulates the words. Jules’ face is full of adoration; a tear collects in one eye and falls, while his hands skillfully regulate the dials. It’s at this point that the picture opens, and from there on we follow the chaos that envelops Jules because of this tape and a second tape that he knows nothing about. A barefoot prostitute, running away from two assassins and trying to reach a policewoman to turn over a cassette revealing names and details of a narcotics-and-vice ring, sees the killers coming at her, and, just before being murdered, she drops the tape in the saddlebag of Jules’ bike. The wide-eyed music lover Jules is the subject of two intertwined chases. The police and the killers are after him for the prostitute’s exposé, and a pair of Chinese record pirates from Taiwan are trying to get his concert tape, so that they can use it to blackmail Cynthia Hawkins into signing with them – they threaten that if she doesn’t they’ll release the illicit recording.

For a while, Jules innocently goes on about his life. In a music store, he watches a young Vietnamese girl, Alba (played by the fourteen-year-old Thuy An Luu), as she calmly snitches a record and brazens it out with the suspicious clerk. The unfazable Alba is the post-Godardian tootsie – in her short-short skirts and transparent plastic coat, she’s a lollipop wrapped in cellophane. Alba appears to have no inner life at all, to be totally – and enchantingly – a creature of surface attitudes, all pose. In the street, outside the store, she tells Jules that the record is a present for a guy who’s in his cool phase, and takes him to meet the guy – Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), the most dream-born of the characters (and ultimately, perhaps, the least successful element). When you see this movie, which opened in Paris in March, 1981, and is still running (it has just won some of the top French prizes - Best First Film, and Best Photography, Sound and Music), you get a clear sense of what went wrong for Coppola in his “One from the Heart”. Much of what Coppola seemed to be aiming for – the dreamy-disco fun in the detritus of tech commercialism (bashed-in old cars, broken signs, painted skies on billboards) – Beineix had already got onto the screen. And Beineix made it work, because his picture has the baroque characters to go with it – a dozen or so of them – and an amusing enough suspense plot to support it (though the plot is so smart it outsmarts itself in places, and the introduction of a fairy godfather does seem a bit of a cheat). Jules lives in a warehouse-like garage and auto graveyard that’s reached by a huge car-lift elevator, and Gorodish (he could be thirty-five or forty) lives in a vast bluish space so large Alba skates around in it. Kinetic sculptures slosh water back and forth, and Gorodish works on the waves of a giant jigsaw puzzle of the sea, while piling up Gitanes cigarette boxes, with their wavy blue and white lines. When all hell breaks loose around Jules, Gorodish in his white suit helps him hide out by packing him into his white Citroen and taking him to a lighthouse-castle that’s magical in the blue dawn light. Gorodish seems to be a punkers’ deus ex machina, wise in the ways of criminals. He knows how to deal with the forces in society, and, effortlessly, he has the wherewithal to do it. The hero of a novel by Delacorta – which, adapted by Beineix and Jean Van Hamme, served as the taking-off place for “Diva” – Gorodish is the bemused Mr. Cool. The conception may be all too airily French. Gorodish is a tease of character – a Zen master of gadgetry – and he’s enjoyable. But toward the end, when he takes over, something gets dampened. Gorodish isn’t either believably human or high-wire enough to be a creature of fantasy. He’s in between.

Jules’ garage, with its crippled Rolls-Royce and its posters for events long past, looks much like Frederic Forrest’s dream refuge in “One from the Heart”, but there’s a sizable difference. Forrest’s company was Reality Wrecking, and he wandered through the painted Las Vegas set morosely. Beineix accepts the faddish, constantly changing reality; he didn’t build this vision – it isn’t a set, it’s Paris as he sees it, and he shows the crazy, dissociated pleasures in it. He isn’t
even saying that this is a condemned playground; he doesn’t make any moral judgment – he’s having too much fun looking at the players. “Diva” is the human side of Alphaville. Even gags, such as Alba in Jules’ garage hopscotching on a nude woman painted on the floor, or Gorodish wearing a diver’s mask and snorkel as he chops onions, seem to come out of their characters. And conceits, such as Alba sitting on top of Gorodish’s refrigerator as if she were Helen Morgan on the piano, or affectations, such as Jules strolling in the Tuileries with Cynthia Hawkins and holding a white umbrella above her head to frame her beauty, seem exactly what these characters would do. Beineix presents people who charm us because they arrange their reality to suit their whims. They’re unself-conscious about being self-conscious. Godard showed us people who were turning into cartoons; the people here don’t mind being cartoons – they amuse themselves at it. They make their lives scintillate.

When Cynthia listens to Jules’ tape of her singing, she realizes she was wrong to be against recording. But in a way she wasn’t. If you put on the record of Wilhelmenia Fernandez singing her big number in the movie – the aria from the first act of Catalani’s “La Wally” – you may decide that Cynthia Hawkins was right, because without her beauty and the drama of her presence and the charged setting that movie gives her performance, her voice isn’t quite as overwhelmingly glorious. A movie can do for a performer most of what a live stage appearance can do, and then some. (What singer in a solo recital could afford a whole orchestra behind her?) Actually, the entire movie demonstrates the richness that you can get only from movies. If it’s about anything, it’s about the joy of making them. (At the lighthouse, Alba serves Jules coffee out of a coffeepot that could be a miniature version of the lighthouse itself.)

“Diva” is a later stage of what Godard was getting at in “Masculine Feminine” and in his other movies about “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola” – except that now Marx is gone and New Wave music and video games have settled in. What Marxists and other puritans have never wanted to allow for is the fun to be had with the material goodies that capitalism produces (such as entertaining movies). Godard knew it, recognized that alienation wasn’t all torment, and then somehow blotted it from his mind. (When he became more political, he wanted us all to be tormented.) Alba, the wise-child playmate, may be shell-shocked, but she’s having a good time. The young actress Thuy An Luu is completely at ease in front of the camera; if that’s the result of fundamental indifference (and it may very well be), it works to her great advantage here. Jules is the Jean-Pierre Léaud of Godard’s films with a love of music and a sweeter nature; he wears an invisible aureole, but he’s still a fan. Cynthia treats him like a lovely pet, and that seems just about right – he’s birdlike. (Wilhelmenia Fernandez’ American-accented French and her amateurishness as an actress are ingratiating. It’s her bad luck, though, to be caught in the only real lapse of judgment in the movie: Cynthia invites Jules to stay with her while she practices, and then proceeds to sing “Ave Maria” – the banality of the choice momentarily strips her of glamour.)

Beineix may not be interested in what’s underneath, but he has a great feeling for surfaces. A chase through the Métro and an escape to a pinball-machine and video-game arcade are so ravishing that they’re funny, intentionally. The whole high-tech incandescence of the film is played for humor. Beineix takes it for granted that we’ll make all sorts of connections between his images and other movies we’ve seen – Cynthia Hawkins at the start is like Arletty’s Garance in “Children of Paradise”; a police informer who works on a boardwalk operating a Wheel of Chance has layer upon layer of movie associations; there’s a little salute to Marilyn Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch” and Welles is in the huge deserted bluish factory where the all-knowing Gorodish arranges a meeting with the villain – it recalls “The Trial”. Welles is everywhere. But Beineix doesn’t force connections on us. Everything is deft, flamboyant yet light – Jules takes Cynthia Hawkins’ pearly satin gown and flings it around his neck, like a First World War aviator’s scarf, as he rides off on a borrowed motorbike. In the factory, Gorodish’s tape-recorded voice directs the villain. Every shot seems to have a shaft of wit. It’s Welles romanticized, gift-wrapped. It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.