Word: diva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Alice Ford, Soprano Katia Ricciarelli sang with a lustrous tone that matched her resplendent blond beauty and sparkling stage presence. Hers is a voice that can both beguile with gentle lyricism and blaze with the incandescence of a high-spirited diva. Other noteworthy performances came from American Mezzo Brenda Boozer, who made a lively Meg Page, and Soprano Barbara Hendricks and Tenor Dalmacio Gonzalez, who sang touchingly as the young lovers. British Director Ronald Eyre kept the action crisp; he was correctly content to execute the composer's wishes, rather than impose a fashionably idiosyncratic view...
...DIVA Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix; Screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix and Jean Van Hamme...
...Diva, a first feature by Jean-Jacques Beineix, 35, has flair to spare. No picturesque French location, from a bombed-out concert hall to a Normandy lighthouse, is too remote. No surface-water, a car hood, sunglasses-is too outré to keep it from reflecting a passerby's face. No character is too quirky to escape shoehorning into the film's delirious narrative. Jules (Frédéric Andrei) is a postal messenger in love with an opera star (Wilhelmenia Fernandez)-a diva so protective of her gift that she refuses to record even her greatest...
...hardly matters that Diva's plot components do not parse. The best thrillers rarely traffic in linear common sense; nobody, including Raymond Chandler, ever figured out who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. But they did evoke a world so cohesively ominous that when life and death eyeballed each other at the denouement, it mattered which one blinked first. No such laws operate in Diva. In an early scene, we see a harried woman trudging barefoot through a Metro station; she recognizes two men-a skinheaded punk and a swarthy rake-and smiles enigmatically as they pursue...
...better part of two hours, he keeps the viewer interested too. In this torpid movie season, Diva is to be seen and savored for Philippe Rousselot's electric-blue imagery, for Hilton McConnico's extravagant decors, even for the prodigal joy Beineix derives from parading his talent. And there are some quietly astonishing moments when, with just the touch of hand on neck, the film suggests a growing, reciprocal affection between diva and devotee. It is on these occasions that Beineix's seems a promising movie career indeed-when you can see the young man of flair...