Re-released by Rialto with new subtitles, this zippy French thriller from 1981 is an occasion to revisit the superlatives lavished on director Jean Jacques Beineix by American critics. “If ‘Diva’ is about anything, it’s about the joy of making movies,” exulted Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. “The real subject of ‘Diva’ is the director’s joy in making it,” rhapsodized Roger Ebert at the time. “A movie devoted strictly to the pleasure principle,” diagnosed David Ansen in Newsweek. “The most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year,” plugged J. Hoberman in The Village Voice. Twenty-five years later, “Diva” is a “postmodern classic” sporting “a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss.” I saw it back then and thought it was moderately cool, but it did not reward a second look. Even if degrees of coolness are the very definition of time-sensitive, “Diva” is merely a cinematic core-sample from the so-called “Cinéma du look” phase of French filmmaking. Based on a novel by “Delacorta” (Daniel Odier), the screenplay by Beineix and Jean Van Hamme centers on Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a Paris postman with a moped and a Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder. Infatuated by a diva who never makes records, this fan secretly records African-American soprano Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), then steals her gown as a fetish. In a rococo plot fond of doubles, another recording appears. Moments before her assassination, a prostitute slips a cassette into Jules’ bag. This exposes an international crime organization run by a police chief who sends two detectives to recover the evidence. Two music pirates from Taiwan pursue Jules, too. En route he enlists quirky allies in colorful locales. If nothing else, “Diva” popularized Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally.” An aria first heard in 1892 ages better than this film, made in 1981. “‘Diva’ tells the story of our time, the story of the artist facing the mechanism of production,” Beineix now argues. “‘Diva’ is very, very, modern. When you see the movie again today you realize it hasn’t aged.” 117m. (Bill Stamets)
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