“EVERYTHING ONCE NEW ABOUT DIVA NOW SEEMS NEW AGAIN!... Beineix's artistic audacity only becomes clearer: Not for nothing was the new New Wave of French filmmaking he unleashed called the cinéma du look. The movie's mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another. I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE DIVA 80’s ALL OVER AGAIN!”
– Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly. Click here to read complete article

“A BRASH, SNAZZY THRILLER! Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as "cinéma du look," a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the '80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.”
– Nathan Lee, The Village Voice. Click here to read complete review

“A POSTMODERN CLASSIC!  Beineix’s reprinted and retranslated directorial debut LOOKS AND SOUNDS SUPERB, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography…Flows between its romance, drama and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.”
– Benjamin Sutton, The New York Press. Click here to read complete review

“LIKE SOMETHING BEAMED DOWN FROM THE PLANET OF COOL!  Diva seems organic through and through.  What could be more natural than the juxtaposition of the industrial and the New Wave?…THIS IS STYLE AS A FORCE OF NATURE.”
– David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“GENUINELY SPARKLING!… Beineix has a fabulous camera technique and understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn't take itself too seriously-the whole high-tech incandescence of the film is played for humor…If Diva is about anything, it’s about the joy of making movies.  EVERY SHOT SEEMS DESIGNED TO DELIGHT THE AUDIENCE.”
– Pauline Kael, The New Yorker. Click here to read complete review

“You have only to watch ten minutes of Diva and you know you are in the hands of a man born to make movies. SENSUAL, FUNNY, OUTLANDISH, THIS IS A MOVIE DEVOTED STRICTLY TO THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE. ”
-– David Ansen, Newsweek

“A PIECE OF DIVINE MADNESS, full of comedy romance, opera and murder. Diva is a thriller with a new way of looking at the world – through a glass, brightly.”
– Michael Sragow, Rolling Stone

“Not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year, but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

(1982) Just one lousy misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising car-and-moped chase through the Métro— hotly pursued by a drug dealer/white slaver/cop honcho’s hit team (including blond, sun-glassed Dominique Pinon, wielding the world’s most vicious awl); ruthless Taiwanese music pirates; and the obviously outmanned flics themselves: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the NEVER-recorded opera super-star Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, as she wraps up a recital with an aria from obscure 19th composer Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally … and, well, maybe also, because of the incriminating tape a hooker on the run from the aforementioned hit squad slipped into his mail pouch…

Longtime assistant director Beineix’s debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best Film and Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography), and singlehandledly launching the cinéma du look, an explosion of visually stunning, punk-inspired, super-cool French movies in the early 80s. And super-cool Diva is, from its color scheme, with a fiery red accent in seemingly every shot; to Richard Bohringer’s contemplative but resourceful protector Gorodish, who smokes cigars in the bathtub, wears a snorkel to cook, and seems to have an endless supply of vintage creamy-white Citroën 11CVs ; and whose near-pre-pubescent Vietnamese sidekick, shoplifter Alba (Thuy An Luu), roller-skates through his cavernous digs; to the outrageous sets, including Andréi’s own car-wreck-strewn garage apartment and a pharaonic lighthouse hideout; to that haunting aria sung by American soprano Fernandez (her only film role: she was cast when the production team, looking to cast a beautiful African-American soprano who spoke French, wandered into a performance of La Bohème in which she starred). Adapted from the novel by the pseudonymous “Delacorta,” one of a series featuring Gorodish and Alba.

A RIALTO PICTURES RELEASE

Click here to read Pauline Kael’s 1982 review (long form)

Click here to read Pauline Kael’s 1982 review (short form)

Click here to read Roger Ebert’s complete 1982 review

“You have only to watch ten minutes of Diva and you know you are in the hands of a man born to make movies.
Sensual, funny, outlandish, this is a movie devoted strictly to the pleasure principle.”
– David Ansen, Newsweek

“Diva is not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year,
but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

“A dazzling first feature and a breath of fresh air.” – Annette Insdorf

“The most impressive debut from a French director since Godard’s Breathless.”– Jay Scott

WILHEMENIA FERNANDEZ SINGS FAVORITE SPIRITUALS CD
Phoenix USA Recordings