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For years my friend Mark told me “divaUnless he’s seriously mistaken, he wrote in an email: love“She. 41 years after its French debut, “Diva” is back on the big screen for a week – at the Film Forum – restored and ready to justify Mark. made I loved. My fate was determined the moment a poor lady got off a train and walked through the station in an elegant shirt dress. She’s not wearing shoes, and the actor who plays her, Chantal Deruaz, is doing her best for the chase that follows. It ends with her piling up on a Paris street because puck is a punk blonde – she looks a lot like her flea – threw an object at his back, like a card in a magic show. It looks like an ice pick. But this is an awl. an awl.
Here’s a glimpse of this film’s captivating, style-soaked priorities. He may have chosen a Hollywood-style weapon. But in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s mondo chic, the murder weapon is something you can use to pierce leather. And the character dies in the daylight with just a whiff of drama. The accordion, bass, drums, and guitar of the soundtrack give it a stunned rock ‘n’ roll micro-burial. It’s been about 12 minutes and I’m very happy already. But what really struck me was the final act of this poor, dazzlingly imprisoned woman. He puts something in one of the mailbags on the hero’s motorcycle.
In part, what’s so delightful about this moment is the weary purpose to which it was planted. But a few scenes later, a series of splashes and some revealing dialogue reveal that this woman didn’t drop a sack of coke or any other murder weapon. It’s just… a tape. And because this movie’s teenage protagonist, Jules (Frédéric Andréi), is so consumed by the fandom for an American opera star, it takes more than half the movie to find out what’s on his (and our) tape. And the woman who threw it in the mailbag had enough faith that the mail system would come for her. That’s what I’ve been missing all these years: It’s so supremely idiosyncratic that it seems to make up itself as it progresses, running in a rectangular line at the pinnacle of Beineix’s – or anyone’s really – cinematic imagination. belief in the redemptive potential of bureaucracy.
The obsession story kicks off the movie. Jules parks his mail-cell phone and walks into one of those run-down theaters whose old-fashionedness has become a kind of glory, a kind of ruin whose functionality feels like the present. Indeed, Jules came not only to watch beloved soprano Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelmenia Fernandez) perform the grand aria from Alfredo Catalani’s “La Wally,” but to surreptitiously record her performance. So on one side is this old opera mounted in an abandoned art palace; and on the other hand this guy uses the latest technology to play the song. This scene is for me the invention of 1980s pop cinema.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN TAKES ACTION his new book, “The Nineties,” claims that this invention came about through the opening sequence of Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo,” which was released in February 1980. This is a thrown claim that really sticks in my mind. I am with him. It’s just Schrader’s film—his materialistic glow; his proposition of consumer capitalism as the new lust – is a bridge from the previous decade to the ’80s. “Diva”, 1980s by Immaculate Conception. It’s as if the 1970s were burned and a movie like this was reborn from their ashes, fully formed.
This isn’t like Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film “The Wiz,” in which New York’s landmarks, topography, and attitude return to themselves in a surreal, wonderful, yet sleepy, way. Beineix wants to get out of stagnation and lethargy. The uncanny beauty of her France, the beauty of trinkets – these are a jolt. Jules lives in what looks like a parking lot. That’s where she reclines on a beach chair and listens to Cynthia’s moonshine like she’s in a pool. Calgon (was then something). And when one of the parties looking for that tape ruins its place, the trashed result still seems fit for the Louvre.
The antique thrives on the avant-garde and the cool: shots of two menacing Taiwanese opera pirates that take Cynthia in the shadows of the aviator and, ultimately, much more. Jules befriends several artists — Richard Bohringer and Thuy An Luu, who shares a large warehouse-like space where he cooks in a scuba mask, the woman swings in a hammock and roller skates; We call it “urban theatre”. All the world here makes sense because everything is going well in “Diva”. This Phare de Gatteville The lighthouse in Normandy was filmed from top to bottom, forever looking like a stone-tested dildo. An antique Citroën becomes a compelling conspiracy vehicle. Jules’ new moped doubles as a genre-movie gimmick combining classicism and modernity.
classic keeps facilitator modern. Jump into the chase between that motorcycle and a cop. I didn’t think I could find this movie more fascinating or compelling. Then these two go to him. The chase begins in the streets, passes through passages along the Rue de Rivoli, enters the Metro, and ends at the feet of the Paris Opera, in keeping with this film. Most cops would give up when Jules got on the subway. This leaves his car and uses his feet. I haven’t seen anyone since Wile E. Coyote who wanted to catch something so desperately and so unsuccessfully. You can imagine Tom Cruise refusing to give up, too. But after Jules escaped, you’ll never catch Cruise bent over, panting.
One outstanding aspect of this sequence is how many passengers are truly shocked to find themselves in the middle of it. jumping out of the way! Another success? The fact that a camera operator, taking orders from director of photography Philippe Rousselot at the beginning of his innovative excellence, must evade vehicles while keeping up with a motorcycle and a cop running up the stairs; upright ones! People always make lists of great movie chases. “Bullitt” and “French Connection” and “Ronin” are reliably close to the top. It’s rare for them. Any list out there that doesn’t rank high must be joking, let alone a list that skips it entirely.
I don’t want to talk about this movie like it’s plot-action-topic. The story is not unimportant, but the strange genius at work strikes the perfect balance between mood and mechanics. The narrative drags on every wave of Beineix’s absurd passion. Many ambitious critics admired how the film managed to be both a thriller and an art film, with an angry example of the French mode tattooed on my heart: cinema du view. This is a style of visual acrobatics and theatrical decor; an approach that can take or leave good acting (definitely stuck here). What I would add to this bewilderment is how this film almost never loses its moral, romantic, aesthetic and ethical priorities, how it needs to be interconnected. “Diva” is about two recordings: Jules’ one from her mailbag and one from Cynthia. Each tape represents a crisis for a woman.
For Cynthia, Jules’ tape violates her entire creative philosophy. He does not believe in the records of his work. And this man who claims to adore her may truly love everything she says, but with ambition. The pair of aviators wearing these two Taiwanese gentlemen – they know Jules’ record and want to do more with them for the money. This is an old American conflict between ownership of black artists’ works and commercial theft. Beineix gives it a transcontinental remix.
If the movie has a weakness, it’s that romance is too forgiving when it comes to ethics. Jules admits to making the recording and stealing the silky dress Cynthia wore to do “La Wally” – and both times her anger slipped. Fernandez is a true opera singer from Philadelphia who shines with a wonderful and good-natured hauteur. She seems to have been thrust into an acclaimed fairy tale in Europe. Cynthia Hawkins is, in fact, such a stark African-American name that it seems particularly odd that she’s not more upset by the predicament she’s in. It’s kind of artistic rape that the movie is too busy being brilliant, too busy. du look-ing, really sitting.
Of course, to be fair, this is also a movie about theft. Here, the more camera angles, the more ways to play. Also, the other record warns of an imminent sexual danger. Nadia, the woman who was so ostentatiously killed in the opening minutes, died as she received breaking news about her health from Paris law enforcement. It’s the kind of cutting-edge development that seems odd today. Now, you’re going to spill your beans on Instagram or Twitter and lose half the movie. And maybe – maybe – he doesn’t take the awl.
But this is a true testament to the film’s full cultural assimilation. to feel 1982, when “Diva” hits American theaters, was as exciting as it should have been. It looks like a lot of things now—the original formula MTV, TV, and magazine ads, movies by Hal Hartley and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry and the Wachowskis—whereas when it first premiered, it sounded like little else. beineix is dead In January, and apart from a small series of documentaries, he didn’t do much after that or that; “The Moon in the Gutter” came two years later, and her herculean, raucous romantic epic “Betty Blue” came three years later. But Beineix’s legacy is a generation of artists who can turn dreams into all kinds of lawlessness. So no, I had never seen “Diva” until last week and her influence was so intense that in 60 seconds, I I was in a Calgon barrel, brought back to a memory I never had, and pierced the same way. Awled, if you will. I am also grateful. Mark, thank you.
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