About forty years ago - on March 11th, 1981, according to IMDB - the French thriller Diva by director Jean-Jacques Beineix was released in theatres. "Hitchcockland", commented Time magazine about one year later, when the film opened in the US. More than that, Diva was the movie that - before Blade Runner - defined what cinema of the 80's should look like. A masterpiece with no famous stars that condensed brilliant casting, innovative music score (by Vladimir Cosma, including a famous aria from La Wally by Alfredo Catalani), creative set design. marvelous photography on location in Paris and Normandy, and a perfect plot from a 1979 novel by Delacorta, adapted by Beineix and Belgian novel and comic book author Jean Van Hamme.
The original novel is the second in a series by Swiss Zen master Daniel Odier, writing under the name Delacorta. His characters are Serge Gorodish, former pianist and conman, and his underage girlfriend Alba, with whom he has a non-sexual relationship. Their film versions are slightly more surreal: Alba (Thuy Ann Luu) is a vietnamese petty thief and model in a multiethnic Paris, while nothing is revealed about Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), except his music culture, his classic education ("Abyssus abyssum invocat", he quotes in Latin from the Bible) and his Zen background, revealed in the scene of "le zen dans l'art de la tartine".
Later in the film we discover that Gorodish knows how to move in the dangerous Parisian milieu. He becomes a mythic figure, a guardian angel driving a white Traction Avant, the car of both cops and robbers.
There's really something of Hitchcock movies in the film's flawed main character, Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a young postman who commits two crimes out of love: first, he makes a bootleg recording at a concert of his favourite diva, African-American soprano Cynthia Hawkins (real opera singer and stunning actress Whilelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who has always refused to put her voice on record; then he steals her dress from the dressing room after the concert, and has it worn by a black prostitute picked up in a street, before having it cleaned and giving it back to Cynthia.
But a couple of crooked Taiwanese record company executives know about the bootleg and plan to steal it, in order to blackmail the singer into making a studio record with them, or they'll release it anyway.
This would be good enough for a thriller movie, but another plot intertwines with the first: Nadia Kalanski (Chantal Deruaz), former lover of corrupt inspector Jean Saporta (Jacques Fabbri), has recorded on tape everything she knows about the drug and prostitution ring led by the top cop. Before she's killed by the gang's two hitmen - L'Antillais (Gérard Darmon) and the antisocial Le Curé (Dominque Pinon), master of icepick throwing - Nadia drops the compromising cassette in the pocket of a postman's scooter. Yes, the same postman.
Young Jules becomes the target of the Taiwanese executives, the ruthless killers and the cops, including policewoman Paula (Anny Romand). After being chased in the streets of Paris and the metro, he nearly gets killed by Le Curé. The story might have a very unhappy ending, but Gorodish steps in like a deus ex machina, as clever as Parker in a Richard Stark novel.
As writer and film expert Stefano Di Marino recently noted in a Facebook post about the movie (that led me to see it again after a long time), both female lead characters, Alba and Cynthia, are non-white, long before anybody started talking about inclusion and diversity: a movie before its time. And to prove the casting is perfect, I'll mention the brief scene of Nadia's escape: her sudden expression when she sees the two hitmen stalking her tells a long traumatic story of violence and captivity in just one brief second.
After forty years, Diva is still an unmissable lesson in europulp filmmaking and storytelling.
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