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Review
Visually, this is a stunning piece of cinema – and a great debut for film director Jean-Jacques
Beineix. The photography is so fast, energetic and just plain classy that it leaps
off the screen and grabs you by the throat.
There is an amazing and truly breathtaking chase sequence, which takes in the Paris metro, with some very unusual – and often disorientating camera movements. And the ending - although in essence just a bog-standard shoot out between the good and the bad guys - is shot so well that it should quicken the pulse of even the most phlegmatic of cinema-goers. The originality and pace of the visuals is matched equally by the excellent musical score. This includes extracts from Catalani’s opera La Wally, sung quite beautifully by the soprano Wilhelmenia Fernández. The contrast between the grace and beauty of the opera music and Cosma’s disturbing modern accompaniment brilliantly underscores the contrast of the two worlds between which the postboy Jules is caught – that of a beautiful opera singer and the murderous thugs. Whilst Diva is undoubtedly a great film, it is marred slightly by its convulted plot, which involves more story strands than the film is capable of sustaining. The film works because, despite this, it is so brilliantly assembled. © James Travers 2000 Write a review for this film...User Comments
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Director:
Jean-Jacques Beineix
Starring: Frédéric Andréi, Roland Bertin, Richard Bohringer, Gérard Darmon, Chantal Deruaz Synopsis
Jules, a young Parisian postman, secretly records a concert performance given by the opera
singer Cynthia Hawkins, whom he idolises. The following day, Jules runs into a woman
who is being pursued by armed thugs. Before she is killed, the woman slips an audio
cassette into his mail bag. Unwittingly, the young postman becomes the target of
some sinister Orientals who saw him record the concert and the sadistic armed killers,
who have been instructed to recover the audio cassette at any cost...
Credits
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