Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, ‘cinema du look’ and films that get the legacy they deserve

Open this photo in gallery:

Of the eight films up for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards, how many will be remembered 40 years from now? The question of legacy and influence was rolling around my head last week after watching an archival 35 mm print of Diva, screened as part of TIFF’s recently wrapped tribute to soprano Jessye Norman (the film is a personal favourite of the opera star’s). Turning 38 years old this year, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s wild cinematic confection – part crime drama, part romance, part musical – brought out a surprisingly large number of Toronto cinephiles for a freezing weeknight, and it should do the same in another 38 years (assuming theatres still stand in 2057). While it was my first time watching the film – and I’m still wrestling with its rhythms and philosophy – there are so many ideas and so much talent contained within Diva that I wish I had the power to turn the cultural conversation away from the train-wreck Oscars, and toward Beineix’s never-nominated curiosity. Luckily, as an editor and writer with this privileged platform, I can. And so I will. If you’ll indulge me.

To dissect Diva, the first cut made should be just below its surface, which is where much of the film initially seems to exist. Without getting into the narrative weeds, Beineix’s work can be seen as a treatise on individuality: who possesses it, who steals it, who certifies it and who is allowed to profit from it. Following the trail of two illicit audiotapes – one a confession detailing a sex-trafficking ring, the other a bootleg recording of a famed soprano’s concert – Diva asks what happens to voices once they are taken from their original owners and repurposed for various ends.

Opening inside Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Beineix has the sounds of Ebben? Ne andro lontana from the Italian opera La Wally flood his soundtrack. The aria is a transformative work, even or especially for opera novices (myself included) – a haunting, raise-the-hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck piece of music reserved for the world’s best sopranos. Here, it’s performed by Wilhelmenia Fernandez (in her first and only feature-film performance) in her role as Cynthia Hawkins, an American singer who has never allowed her work to be recorded. That wish will soon be betrayed, just like the autonomy of the far-less celebrated woman on the flip side of Diva’s plot, a prostitute who dies trying to expose a criminal enterprise.

An examination of autonomy (both personal and creative, if the two are separate) seems like problematic, risky material for an ostensibly commercial ride such as Diva, which comes complete with gun fights, double-crosses and car chases. But while Beineix employs Hollywood tropes, he doesn’t wallow in them. With its excitable cinematography, sharp editing, meticulous production design, wild-card characters and off-beat narrative humour, Diva is a conventional thriller glimpsed from the rear-view mirror. Almost everything about the movie walks the line of familiar and irreverent, derivative and interrogative. And it’s in this space in-between where Beineix can have his big questions about art and humanity and eat his icing-slicked genre cake, too.

Open this photo in gallery:

There are sneer-worthy villains in Diva, but they’re accessorized with idiosyncratic details, including the thug in the fashion-forward leather suit jacket, or his partner, from whose left ear perpetually hangs a single earbud. Every location is torn from the pulp playbook, but dipped in acid. I’m still dreaming about the lair of mystery man Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) and his young partner-in-crime-and-almost-anything-else Alba (Thuy An Luu), whose home is a vast blue-lit emptiness filled with only a hammock, a wave-motion machine and a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of the ocean. There’s the domain of the film’s sorta-hero, the naive and rather horny postman Jules (Frédéric Andréi), who lives behind an abandoned auto-body shop that’s apparently been gussied up by gauche street artists with a lot of time on their hands. And then there’s the five-star property occupied by Cynthia, so crammed with absurdly huge bouquets that it’s half hotel, half greenhouse.

There are also explosions, and one hell of a chase scene through Paris’s Metro system – yet Beineix’s thrills seem foreign to expectations. Nearly ever frame pops off the screen with a frenetic energy and curiosity divorced from the mainstream, and while Diva threatens to spill over into high-chic excess, Beineix constantly pulls himself back moments before disaster. The aforementioned Metro set-piece is slick, but it’s also unpredictably jittery. A warehouse-set confrontation could have unfolded like any other third-act standoff, but it is twisty and darkly hilarious. I’d like to think that this is all Beineix’s remarkable self-control kicking in, with the director wary of undermining his true interests. Namely: That obsession can lead to destruction, that commodification is inevitable and that art is destined to be misunderstood.

On this last point, the culture lived up to his expectation. At least for a little while. Eight years after Diva premiered, French critic Raphaël Bassan called Beineix’s film the birth of “cinéma du look,” in which flashy style was favoured over the narrative and emotional substance of the French New Wave. Luc Besson and Leos Carax were grouped along with Beineix in Bassan’s not-complimentary theory, which carried more than a whiff of elitism, as if a film such as Diva was unable to balance beauty (overwhelming beauty, but beauty all the same) with deeper concerns. “Cinéma du look” works as a baseline moniker for Diva – the film certainly demands audiences observe, and hold that penetrative stare – but Beineix does not stop at surface-level pleasures. Diva rattles the soul as much as the eye.

Neatly, and inevitably, Beineix’s fascination with reproduction and imitation has led to countless others picking apart his film for their own purposes. Much of Besson’s latter-day career, especially The Fifth Element, can be traced back to his countryman’s work in Diva. There are also echoes in everything from Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish to John Frankenheimer’s Ronin to James Cameron’s Terminator. Beineix won several Cesars (the French Oscars) for Diva, but was ignored by the Academy Awards, and his career never reached past the heights of this, his first feature. Fortunately, the current streaming landscape means eager audiences can experience the film on Amazon Prime Video or iTunes. Watch it today, and take comfort in the fact that Diva will remain just as memorably complex, imitated and thrilling in four decades time.