Customer Reviews
Classic 80's French Film - By: L. Davidson, 02 Sep 2007 
"Diva" now looks slightly dated (it is nearly thirty years old) but it is still a very stylish & visuallly appealing film. The plot centres around two separate tape recordings which falll into the possession of a young courier & which violent & determined men are keen to relieve him off. I found the film to be too slow moving at times & I thought that the coherence of the plot was often overshadowed by the stylish imagery & arty cinematography.
A French crime-chase thriller, and stylishly done - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 08 Aug 2007 
Jules (Frederic Andrei) is a young special delivery messenger in Paris who loves opera & worships the singer Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhemenia Wiggins Fernandez). She's famous for never making recordings. Jules secretly tapes her, & the action starts. Two Taiwan hoods learned of his plans & are determined to steal the tape so they can make bootleg copies. At the same time, a prostitute lets the police know that she made a tape implicating the chief of police in some very nasty crimes involving prostitution & drugs. The tapes get mixed up, & the Taiwan hoods & two ruthless killers working for the police chief go after Jules. He meets & is helped by a young Viet Namese girl & her protector, played by the first-rate French actor Richard Bohringer. Things sort themselves out but only after two hours of stylish, exciting film making, the development of interesting characters you start to care about, especiallly Jules, & a first-rate chase involving Jules on his moped in & out of the Paris Metro.
The opera recording Jules made is of Hawkins singing an aria from La Wallly. The actress playing the role, Wilhemenia Wiggins Fernandez, is an opera singer (and a good actress). She probably had a lot of movie goers running to record shops trying to get her stuff. It's a beautiful, haunting piece of work & is heard several times.
I think Diva is an excellent, high-class mystery/chase movie that holds up very well. Watching it again reminded me of how much I liked it the first time I saw it. The DVD transfer is acceptable.
Dilightfull!! - By: Mr. D. Swan, 18 Jul 2007 I saw this film a few years after it came out, thought it was absoloutly stunning, certainly one of the new wave of chic French films that paved the way for other such classics as Betty Blue. Watching it again as an adult wasn't quite as fulfilling as the last time I saw it as an impressionable youth.
Diva basicallly has 2 plots that run side by side, the story of 2 tape recordings, One a Illegal recording of an Opera Diva made by a postman & the other a testimony by a local prostitute about a powerful Drug Lord, The postman ends up in possession of both & is chased by 2 sets of criminals, 2 Chinese chaps & 2 french hitmen, Dominique Pinon, one of the hitmen seems to be dressed exactly like the Terminator, Theres even one scene in the film that shares more than a passing resemblance to a scene in T2, Coincidence???. Anyway, these 2 plots don't seem to mesh that well & either one on there own would have been sufficient to carry the movie. Although not too much of a weakness they do make the film a little over long. Having said that apart from the slightly clunky scenario Diva has more than enough cool moments & characters to keep you hooked. It's also a triumph in cinematography, each scene & shot seems to have been lite & structured as if it was a painting, each frame being as important & well thought out as any masterpiece in the Lourve.
If your into foreign of French cinema you just have to have this, it's probably THE most important French film of the 80's & you can see it's influence on nearly every French production since .
Powerful and beautiful. - By: JFP, 18 Apr 2007 
This is a fantastic film. It is wonderfully directed with an absorbing mixture of images & sound that resonate & linger in the mind long after you have finished watching it. The images & music are intelligently woven together. On one level it is a fairly straightforward "chase tale" - with the police & the bad guys hunting the main character who is obsessed with both Opera & a singer. On other levels it is about fear, greed, love, rites of passage, self-image, status, friendship, trust, capitalism, morality, beauty, class, race. It is also funny in places. As a non-French speaker who struggles with "foreign language"(to me) films I have found myself watching this several times & as a result have looked at other French Movies. It is probably just worth watching the film for the skinhead psychopath who hunts the main character through the film.
