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Diva: An entanglement of tapes, mopeds, arias
by Roger Ebert Jan 10, 2008
Peering into obscure corners of Paris, Jean-Jacques Beineix emerged with an assembly of unlikely, even impossible, characters to populate his "Diva" (1981), a thriller that is more about how it looks than what happens in it. Here is an exhilarating film made for no better purpose than to surprise and fascinate. The plot is both preposterous and delightful, put together out of elements that seem chosen for their audacity. The central character is a young postman named Jules, who races the streets on his moped, delivering special delivery mail and pausing at an opera recital to secretly record a performance by a tall, black, gorgeous American soprano named Cynthia Hawkins.
Now Jules has the only existing tape of her singing; it is priceless, but he wants it only for himself. Unfortunately, he was seen making the recording by two Taiwanese bootleggers, who want to steal it from him. And his problems grow more complex when two gangsters murder a prostitute on a street where he is making a delivery. She has a tape incriminating the chief of police in a sex-slavery ring, and before she dies, she slips the tape into the carrier bag of his moped. Now four deadly crooks are looking for him.
Jules lives in his own way, in his own shadowy industrial space, which is filled with crashed cars and wall paintings of automobiles. Here he listens to the sublime voice. (Fernandez, an established opera diva, did her own singing and created an early-1980s boom for Catalani's opera "La Wally" and its first-act aria.) One day at a record store, Jules spots a Vietnamese nymphet named Alba (Thuy An Luu) shoplifting a 33 rpm record with a cleverly designed art portfolio, which seems to contain only nude photographs of herself.
He follows her, asks her how she did it, they discover they share a love of opera, and he lets her listen to his recording. She supplies it to a mysterious, cigar-smoking, handsome older man named Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), who lives in an industrial loft of vast size, furnished mostly by a chair, a bed, a bathtub and an aquarium. Is this man her lover? Her guru? Why does he seem to possess unlimited wealth and power?