Word: punk
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...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 can muster, follows a few steps behind her. Sati (of course) comes rolling ever so slowly off the soundtrack...
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...
Jules, a young delivery boy, Hawkins, the temperamental opera superstar, a Vietnamese punk beauty named Alba and her lover, an cerie, Prospero-like figure who seems to know what's going on at all the most confusing moments in the movie--these are the film's principal characters. Assorted punks and thugs from at least two underground crime operations and a corrupt chief of police also join in the fray. And an attractive policewoman, who ends up the saving the day, makes a brief but efficient appearance...
...himself. Elvis first made his move during the late '70s, an epochal time for rock, with the Sex Pistols pointing their diabolical fingers at a vulnerable rock world and shaking it out of its mid-'70s doldrums. Although Costello was never really a part of the Pistols' punk movement, he found a comfortable niche anyway, "surfing" on the new wave, as he likes to put it. A pumped-up Steve Nieve keyboard; an acid-tinged tongue; a bitter searching voice--these were the early Costello trademarks, and they even betrayed at times a vitriol seldom equaled by the best...
This standard-issue male sex fantasy is rudely interrupted. A female punk rocker materializes, shouting obscenities and menacing Miles with her electric guitar. She is outraged by the doctor-nurse scene, convinced that Miles has written it to degrade women: "Ever since I got into serious liberation, you been takin' the mickey. I got your number, mate. You're the original pig. Numero Uno." Despite the leather gear, dyed hair and garish makeup, Miles recognizes this apparition as an old, inspiring friend. She is Erato, the classical Muse of lyric poetry and, by historical default, of fiction...