Whatever happened to Jean-Jacques Beineix? Once upon a time--namely, in 1981, with his raucous feature debut Diva--it seemed this young (French) Turk would save movies in the '80s, injecting the yuppie decade with the same joie du cinema the French New Wavers did in the early '60s. Along with Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge) and Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, etc.), he fostered the super-stylish "cinema du look" movement. This plastic shtick found its overseas counterpart in MTV, but Beineix wound up drifting into obscurity, last seen with some thriller called Mortal Transfer in 2001. (His other notable film, 1986's sex-and-suicide classic Betty Blue, is better known for its striking dorm-room-favorite poster than as a film.)
Seeing Diva again, it's not hard to see why Beineix faded away. It smacks of a filmmaker putting everything into this one film, thinking he may never get a chance to make another. On one hand, Diva, based on the Daniel Odier page-turner, is pure genre tomfoolery. A boyish opera-freak postman (Fr�d�ric Andr�i) secretly records a soprano (Philly-born diva Wilhelmina Fernandez) famous for her refusal to commit her singing to records. Around this time a pair of thugs dispense with a prostitute seeking to rat out a slavery ring, but not before she slips an incriminating tape into Andr�i's napsack.
That's the basics, but it gives little sense of Diva's deep, deep bag of tricks. There's a chase set piece for the ages, sure, but there's also odd bits of humor, Taiwanese music pirates, a crooked police chief, gags about Beethoven busts and, oddest of all, a rollerskating Vietnamese pubescent and her mysterious, Zen-cool benefactor-of-sorts--characters whose function to the plot becomes clear only well into the second half.
Beineix's shtick may be more commercially minded than the French New Wave--Diva's like a slicker version of Fran�ois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player--but it's informed by the same love of what cinema can do. Style is substance in Diva, and the thrill is not where the plot will wind up but what corner we'll turn next. Every scene looks and feels radically different from the last, while opera takes up space alongside punk, ambience and Eastern-tinged tracks. Diva's most lasting mark on the world may be that it foresaw the hyphen culture of today, where the world's riches get mashed together into something rich and strange. Like almost nothing else from the '80s, Diva feels oddly now.
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