If you were a cinephile in your teens or early twenties in the 1980s then chances you will have had the poster for DIVA or Betty Blue on the wall. Both films were directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix and, to me, they seemed a window into an impossibly cool world, capturing the zeitgeist despite depicting a world that could not have been further from my own. Chain smoking coolness, effortless charm, riding around on Mobylette with Paris as the backdrop, listening to opera, all to a phenomenal soundtrack of sparse coolness by Vladimir Cosma that could be taken as a future echo of the music of Twin Peaks. DIVA is one of a number of cult classics that sits in many people’s lists of films-to-see-before-you-die. Despite not being an initial commercial success in its native France it was a big art house hit in the US and UK and its popularity was greatly helped by a VHS release in the early 2000s.
DIVA is the story of Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a Parisian postman who is an opera obsessive, in particular the American diva Cynthia Hawkins (Wiggins Fernandez) who never allows her performances to be recorded. It is also the tale of two tapes: one is the reel-to-reel bootleg recording Jules makes of her performing La Wally, and the other a cassette recording of exploited sex worker Nadia exposing the leader of a vice-ring which, at the start of the film, ends up being dropped into one of the paniers of Jules’s Mobylette. These two recordings become the film’s McGuffin with two mysterious Taiwanese men who want the opera recording and two corrupt and murderous detectives looking for the expose cassette.
Beineix places Jules and Hawkins sit at the centre of these intertwining plots while also introducing us to a cast of surreal supporting characters split into good and bad. Alba (Ann Lu) befriends Jules after he sees her shoplifting vinyl, and she is the model/muse to the ultra-chilled Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) who lives is a huge blue room chain-smoking Gauloises, working on blue jigsaws in front of a constantly undulating piece of blue wave-art. The bad are the bootleg hunters, both wearing identical huge mirror shades, and the two corrupt detectives one of whom (Dominique Pinon from in Jeunet and Caro’s oddball masterpiece Delicatessen) is identifiable for his pout, dark shades, penchant for stabbing people, and one single wired headphone poked into his ear. There are also heavily stylised interiors (such as Gorodish’s none-more-blue apartment) including Jules home which is accessed by a shuttered service lift and contains an enormous pop-art mural and car wrecks, a lighthouse, and the elegant but distressed look of the opera house that opens the film.
But at the film’s core is the exceptional rendition of ‘Ebben? Ne andrò lontana’ (Well then? I’ll go far away), the aria from Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally (1892) sung by real life opera star Wilhelmenia Fernandez who also plays Cynthia Hawkins the diva of the title. You will hear it many times during the film (including a beautiful piano and cello arrangement by Cosma) and every time it stirs the heart and the film would be the weaker without it. Cosma’s soundtrack was, like the poster, ubiquitous in people’s record collections (I still have mine) and it deftly mixes the classical with ambient minimalism on ‘Gorodish’ with the mildly atonal ‘Voie sans issue’ through to the achingly beautiful ‘Promenade sentimentale’ that pops up throughout the film as a romantic counterpoint to La Wally’s aria.
The restoration is so crisp it looks like it could have been filmed this year but like all films shot pre-mobile they date themselves with cabled rotary telephones and phone boxes being integral to plot. You also have to suspend your disbelief that Jules manages to smuggle a bulky Nagra reel-to-reel recorder into the show without being searched and gets backstage without any trouble to meet Cynthia Hawkins and steal her dress (imagine trying to take a bulky recorder into a Taylor Swift concert before wandering backstage after to have a chat with the star after the show). Also, how can a postman can afford the kind of huge loft apartment normally reserved for an eccentric tech-bro. Those things aside, and having not seen DIVA for at least a decade, I found I was still willing to go through the looking glass into the world Beineix created and luxuriate in the incredible mise en scène of this stylish romantic thriller with a phenomenal score.
The spectacular 4K restoration is produced from the original 35mm negative and sound negative. This is a film that has been meticulously lit with a carefully designed colour palette now revitalised to Beineix’s sumptuous vision of icy to cerulean blues, dirty and warm yellows and the pops of red and purple when Jules and Cynthia are together. The image was “digitally graded and cleaned to remove imperfections from the original with the whole project being was carried out by the Studiocanal team of Sophie Boyer and Jean-Pierre Boiget“. The DVD comes in 4K and Ultra HD formats and features two comprehensive documentaries about the film Blue as DIVA (featuring cast and famous fans of the film) and DIVA (an analysis by Denis Parent).
The DVD is released by Studiocanal and available from all good DVD sellers along with many other cult classics such as The Third Man, The Conversation, Delicatessen, The Wicker Man (my review of that here), Mulholland Drive and Don’t Look Now.
Review by Paul F Cook
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