Insanely gorgeous. Fatally Flawed. Intense. Why am I looking at this like that? Conceited, I’ll concede, but totally stunning. Jean-Jacques Beineix’s masterpiece digs into the filth and the pathos while flooding us with the intense beauty of that which in many deep ways hasn’t changed now in nearly half a century. And it features the uniquely composed, cerebral INTJ protagonist, the man who solves the problems of our violent, chaotic, nuanced microcosm from his bathtub.
Opening with Alfredo Catalan’s sublime, but whimsically named masterpiece and viciously ripping us back to the intensely mundane in the first few seconds, Diva represented “a constant battle between Jean-Jacques Beineix digressive, imagistic, ‘baroque’ imagination and his producer’s insistence on a tight thriller”. They hated the title, aspects of Beineix’s style, and the producers’ disappointment meant that the film was almost not distributed at all.
We are told that the contemporary style of the film was “hyper-realist, post-punk visual style – overlooking, perhaps, the traditions of humanism and genre cinema, the policier, in which the film is rooted”. Moreover, “Pop Art decors, offbeat locations, selective colours and idiosyncratic compositions are assertively used to create a fantasy world which is only a sidestep from crime movie realism…”Another critic noted that “…the seduction of Diva is in its extraordinary sets and the way in which, through combinations of light, shadow, spatial relations, carefully chosen and positioned objects, forms and graphics and matched colours, something is created which is distinctly otherworldly while being firmly, almost prosaically, situated in the real world”. Actually, there is a lot more to it and it is deeply layered.
Richard Bohringer’s Gorodish exudes a cool, almost philosophical detachment that frames his relationship with Alba in a way that feels more protective and enriching than Daniel Odier’s unwholesome original novel, where their dynamic leans into a more ambiguous and potentially troubling territory. The film’s stylized neo-noir aesthetic further elevates Gorodish into a figure of enigmatic control, his calculated mannerisms and near-mythic presence reinforcing the film’s dreamlike detachment from moral ambiguity.
Beineix described some of the more fantastic, even improbable elements of the film, such as Gorodish replacing his elegant white Citroën Traction Avant with an identical one after the first has been exploded killing two villains, as those of “a character manipulating the plot from within”. Isn’t that just the way to play the game? And Auty suggests that in some ways “the dramatic structure is strikingly close to the operatic form and it is entirely appropriate that the film should end in an opera-house”.
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 96% with a critical consensus that states: “Beineix combines unique cinematography, an intelligent script, and a brilliant soundtrack to make Diva a stylishly memorable film”.
David Russell asserts that the film is by far Beineix’s best and is “probably one of the most important films of the 1980s”. Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote of the film’s visual ties to cinéma du look, “the movie’s mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.”
Very few pieces of art juxtapose the beauty of art and light and being with the squalid underlying reality of existence.