Word: diva
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...PARTICULARLY poignant moment in Jean Jacques Beineix's new movie Diva. Cynthia Hawknis, the striking Black soprano of the title, and her adoring fan Jules stroll through the streets of a rainy and ancient Paris. Floating serenely across grassy parks and statue-ridden boulevards, the pair find themselves suspended in a world more appropriate to the match-making machinations of Maurice Chevalier in Gigi than to the high tech high punk goings-on of the film's other characters. Hawkins carries a ruffled parasol, and young Jules, wearing the kind of lean and hungry look that only a European...
When the lovers awake the next morning in Diva's hotel suite, the camera pans lovingly over every elegant, sun-drenched detail--embroidered sheets, flowers, lacy curtains, Hawkins' sculpted profile--before coming to rest on a sleeping, naked Jules. After a few moments of admiring contemplation, it pans back to reveal a delightful surprise: The boy has spent the night not, as the viewer assumes, between his siren's sheets but chastely on her couch...
...Diva is filled with moments like this, incidents that deliberately give an edge to what might otherwise seem like over-serious cinematic cliches. Although the film's near-perfection would excuse almost any minor directorial excess, it is nevertheless wonderful when an unexpected twist--for instance that a sadistic punk in aviator glasses, army boots and an earplug has in fact been listening to accordion music, of all things--startles the audience out of its complacency. One of the nicest things about Diva is its ability to generate goose-pimpling suspense while laughing, just a little, at the classical suspense...
That would be just fine to many men, and not a few women, with more traditional ideas of female beauty. Insists Beverly Sills, the diva who now runs the New York City Opera: "There is a growing strength in women, but it's in the forehead, not the forearm. Men will always be attracted to women with nice soft arms and a fleshy bosom." Playboy magazine's 1982 Playmate of the Year, Shannon Tweed, is about the same height and weight as Mariel Hemingway, but her contours are different ? in the soft lines and curves that her beau, Publisher...
...join the Vienna Royal Opera. At the Metropolitan Opera, where she sang from 1921 to 1932, the director reported that the largest ovation he had ever heard followed her "Vissi d'arte, "the great second-act aria in Tosca; she sang it prostrate on the floor. A tempestuous diva onstage and off, Jeritza gathered three husbands, prompted whispers of affairs with composers and feuded audaciously with tenors and other sopranos...