Word: divas
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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...
...film's two plots--one dealing with Jules' obsession with the diva and the other, with the sleazy operations of something called the "Caribbean Connection"--revolve around the time-honored devices of mistaken identity and unwitting involvement in crime. When Jules illicitly tapes a Hawkins concert, he becomes the object of a sinister gang of Taiwanese sporting mirror-sunglasses who are trying to obtain pirated recordings of the famous singer. (For "artistic reasons," Hawkins has always refused to make records). And when a prostitute escaping from the "Caribbean Connection" (which seems to have something to do with white slavery...
WHAT PUTS DIVA in a class above the usual plotty thriller is its bizarre setting. There are no romantic sidewalk cafes or sunsets over the Eiffel Tower in this Paris. Instead, the viewer enters a world of neon and cellophane and leather--a world in which vast underground garages contain video palaces and cats have names like "Ayatollah" and everyone lives in a loft. And yet, what makes this punked-out environment intriguing is that it contains many small reminders of the old Paris. Jules first meets Alba when he watches her shoplift records in a discomat. She is dressed...