In with the new: eighties Paris hipsters outdo the old and the new

The re-release of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s postmodern classic Diva at Film Forum this week may come as a surprise. Not because it doesn’t deserve it – that is, assuming that re-releases are based on desert rather than commercial viability, an idealistic proposition in the first place – but because it has aged so well. Beineix’s re-printed and re-translated directorial debut looks and sounds superb, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography. It also flows between its romance, drama, and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.

Diva begins with Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a moped-riding delivery boy, clandestinely recording a performance by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (the title’s diva, played by Wilhelmenia Fernandez). This recording is confused with another Jules receives accidentally, inculpating a Parisian police chief in drug and sex worker trafficking. Multiple parties come after Jules’s tapes while he falls in love with Hawkins, and befriends an intriguing couple (played by Thuy An Luu and Richard Bohringer). Throughout, Diva borrows from surveillance and stake-out movies like Blowup and The Conversation, and early blockbusters like The French Connection – whose canonic chase sequence Beineix shames when Jules rides his motorcycle through the Paris metro. But as much as Diva looks like it’s coming out for the first time, its story and style are rooted in a specific cultural situation.

Diva’s release in 1981 marked the second turning point in French cinema, the first being the emergence of the French New Wave between 1958 and 1960. This movement reanimated a stagnant French film industry – and has influenced every filmmaker since – with its self-reflexive modernist style and myriad high- and low-culture references. Once the New Wave’s disjointed style became the norm, however, the movement lost steam. Then came Diva, the second turning point, directly responding to the first. After alienating film essays by polemical directors, Beineix introduced a trendy, cool aesthetic that favored plot development. Diva sparked is own movement, dubbed “Cinéma du look,” rooted in the disenfranchised youth subcultures of Paris in the eighties, as opposed to the pedantic projects of the previous generation of filmmakers.

In its cultural moment, Diva’s crime plot pitting stylish Paris hipsters against corrupt old French men anticipated the young filmmakers of the “Cinéma du look,” reacting against the entrenched older directors of the New Wave. Beineix makes this analogy explicit by having Diva’s most brutish thug behave like a pastiche of the character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in so many Jean-Luc Godard movies. The sense of relief when he finally falls to his death, then, is simultaneous relief for the liberation of French cinema from the self-serious airs of films from Godard’s generation. This is not to reduce Diva to an opposition between young and old, just to show that there’s a lot going on under its surface cool.

A slightly different version of this review appears in the October 31 issue of the New York Press and can be found here.