Cinema
Operatic
Peter Ackroyd
Diva (`AA', selected cinemas) This is an extremely odd film — both very bad and very good, continually hovering on the edge of inconsequence and then draw- ing back, half complicated and half a mess. It is described on the posters as 'Comedy, Romance, Opera, Murder'; if you add to that a police conspiracy involving drugs and prostitution, a singer who is being blackmailed with a 'pirate' recording of her own voice, and a young boy pursued by two different sets of villains, you get some idea of the crazed illogicality which inspires the film. It is almost as if the director, Jean- Jacques Beineix, decided to introduce as many dissimilar stories as possible and then, by a feat of cunning or bravado, to yoke them together.
It opens in a Parisian opera house which might easily pass as a morgue — patched and peeling; and then a black soprano ap- pears on the stage and begins to sing. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be dif- ficult to retain the attention of a conven-
'I want something that will repel a man at fifty feet.'
tional audience through five minutes of La Wally, especially if they had entered the cinema under the impression that they are about to watch a 'thriller'. But it is, in fact, difficult to stop watching the screen. The audience listening to the singer look extra- ordinarily sinister: most of them seem to be wearing dark glasses. A young man, in the uniform of a postman, is concealing a piece of electrical equipment on his lap: perhaps it is a bomb. In fact nothing of any conse- quence occurs; but the trick has been ac- complished. The attention of the audience has been caught in the most subtle manner, and we know at once that we are in the presence of a film-maker who has a definite command over his medium.
The film at once changes mood, a harb- inger of the variety of tones which will be introduced throughout the film. The young postman infiltrates the singer's dressing room and steals her robe. The newspaper headlines the next day amuse him: 'WHO STOLE THE DIVA'S GOWN?', but the comedy of the situation is overshadowed by the more sinister interpretations which could be placed upon his action. After that, the plot becomes too complicated to describe in brief: a cassette is dropped into his bag, he meets a strange gentleman known as 'Men- tor' who is trying to 'stop the waves of the sea' and practises the Zen art of buttering bread, he confronts the diva with her robe and they become friends. These stories, each of them quite unlikely, are dovetailed together so that by indirection the life of the film becomes quite diverse; event triggers off event, characters accidentally meet and part in the manner of a 19th-century novel.
But Diva is not as good as the analogy might suggest, since it remains ramshackle and slightly whimsical. This may, however, be deliberate since the important thing here is not the story but the effects which it can produce. I don't mean by this a simple distinction between style and content: in the cinema the style is the content, and here we have a sombre and mannered presentation which defines the area in which the characters can move. Life presses down upon them, and they suffocate beneath the convolutions of the plot — each twist or turn adding another layer of images or stylised encounters from which they cannot escape.
That makes Diva in many ways a 'cold' affair, which can distance itself from even the most painful or gripping sequence, but it also lends it a certain richness of texture: the director is employing to the hilt all the possibilities of filmic composition which are available to him. It is almost as if he had decided to adopt the conventional features of a 'thriller' and then twist them subtly out of shape. And so we have a film which is part intrigue, part parody, part romantic comedy — all of these elements being spun out with the kind of joyful elaboration and rhetorical bravura which are associated with opera itself. That might, in the end, explain everything and justify an enterprise which is complicated, perverse, deliberately unreal and sometimes beautiful.
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