‘Diva’ returns to big screen

With its fantastically intricate plot and striking visual style, “Diva,” a 1981 French film that exploded onto American screens in 1982, heralded a new movement in French and American film. As part of a 25th anniversary re-release, it opens today locally at Landmark’s E Street Cinema.

The return of his film to the big screen must please the director, Jean-Jacques Beineix. Speaking by telephone from Paris, however, it turns out Mr. Beineix is happiest not for himself but for his country.

“It just shows that sometimes you shouldn’t read too much into the magazines when they say French culture is decadent and doesn’t exist anymore,” he pointedly says. A provocative cover story in Time just two months ago, headlined “The Death of French Culture,” argued that Gallic culture was in decline, particularly in terms of international appeal.

“It shocked me,” Mr. Beineix says, adding that the re-release of his film shows that French culture “is something that you can share and that is lasting. This film lasts.”

In fact, the 61-year-old director is also glad to see the film re-released here because, as he says, “America was in great part responsible for the discovery of the film.” American critics embraced the fun, free-spirited film much more enthusiastically than did French critics (although he did win the Cesar Award, France’s Oscar equivalent, for best new director).

That might be because it had a style completely unlike the dominant mode of French film at the time. “Diva,” which Mr. Beineix co-wrote with Jean Van Hamme based on a novel by Daniel Odier, follows a Parisian postman named Jules (Frederic Andrei) as he goes on the run to avoid two groups of men after him for two different recordings he holds in his possession. One is a secret tape the opera lover made of a recital by an American singer (Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez) who refuses to make recordings; the other is a tape that a doomed prostitute put in his mailbag outing a policeman as the leader of a drug and prostitution ring.

The cleverly constructed plot isn’t what made “Diva” such an influential film, though. It was its style. French films of the 1970s, following the new wave, tended to be gritty works focused on one type of realism. “Diva,” with its rich palette, soaring soundtrack and sometimes fanciful fashions, almost singlehandedly propelled a new movement, the Cinema du Look.

Quite a feat for a debut film, but Mr. Beineix says that wasn’t his intention.

“I didn’t try to change anything,” he says. “I just opened my eyes and had the feeling that the cinema was not necessarily translating the physical reality of the world I was living in.”

That new reality — one in which technology was starting to play a part — has become an everyday part of life now. It’s one reason why a 25-year-old film can be more relevant now than when it was released.

“Do not forget that in the ‘80s, we had no Web network, no cordless phone, no personal computers,” Mr. Beineix notes. “We had no high technology, but the film is about that. It’s about a moment when the whole world is changing, and this is the beginning of a new era which will be an era of reproduction and collecting information and even of piracy and consumerism and commercial value of dematerialized matters … The whole movie is about duplication and a world that is not just anymore a world of physical reality, but a world of display windows, a world of publicity, a world of communication.”

The director believes that despite his influential style, if not for these themes, “it would have been just a quaint or funny old movie that wouldn’t please a young audience nowadays.”

Hollywood was more interested in the style, though. Luc Besson was another practitioner of it, in films such as “Nikita,” and he eventually made English-language films like “The Professional.” Mr. Beineix’s experience in Hollywood never resulted in any films.

“Personally, I would have loved to make films in America. I came many, many, many times to Hollywood, invited by studios more than 40 times,” he reports. The executives he met said they wanted him to make films “ ’with one of the scripts we have in our drawers with the ‘Diva’ style.’ Basically, they didn’t understand what I was, what I wanted. So I just stayed home.”

In one case, he spent two years working with New Line on a film about legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart before walking away. “People would prefer to work on vulgar material,” the outspoken director declares.

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