Diva is the first feature by Jean- Jacques Beineix … One notes first its contemporaneity – a hyper-realist, postpunk visual style – overlooking, perhaps, the traditions of humanism and genre cinema, the policier, in which the film is rooted … The modernity of Beineix’s style should not be undervalued. Pop Art decors, offbeat locations, selective colours and idiosyncratic compositions are assertively used to create a fantasy world that is only a sidestep from crime-movie realism, itself a stylisation from the pulp thriller. The plot, which turns and U-turns on a confusion over two, and subsequently three, tape recordings the various villains would kill for, is a cunning piece of cinematic adaptation, from a novel by Delacorta, that calls attention to the importance of sound. In the opening sequence we hear a full-bodied aria over the credits that is abruptly cut short when the young mailman Jules switches off the cassette machine on his moped. Subsequently, the interaction of classical music with traditional French music or contemporary rock creates further tensions. Beineix also uses silences judiciously interposed between scenes of dialogue and tyre-squealing action. The texture of his images, however, is even richer than that of the soundtrack, for here Beineix has boldly attempted to integrate two environments – a film familiar Paris, the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, and a newer, more vulgar Paris of parking lots, wrecked warehouses and pinball arcades … Beineix acknowledges opera as a key influence on his work, preferring its heightened demonstrative action and stylised settings to conventional film realism … In his use of classical music in modernist settings Beineix has been compared to the young Godard. The most apposite cross-reference is to Breathless. Both films display their affection for Hollywood cinema and Americana through a gangster movie plot and the relationship between a Frenchman and an American woman, and both represent a distinctive departure from the ossifying conventions of the national cinema from which they spring. Such comparison marks Diva as an auspicious debut from a refreshingly original talent.

Martyn Auty, “Sight and Sound”, no. 4, Fall 1982