Diva is another in the vein of eclectic French cinema which embraced a discordant, vaguely operatic structure, foregoing character development in the name of spectacle and provocation. It sits alongside the films of Carax and Jeunet, to name but two. Where this strand emerges from in French culture is an intriguing question. Perhaps all the way back to Rabelais, or Huysmans. Definitely in the arch tomes of Blaise Cendrars, even Jules Verne. This nearest equivalent I can think of in the British canon is Greenaway. The makers of these stories create fantastical fables, which paint unlikely stories with a broad palette. There’s no particular reason why anyone would make a film about a postman who is obsessed with opera and finds himself caught up in a subplot of a vice ring run by a corrupt police inspector, but it’s precisely this melange which makes Diva such a bracing, unlikely watch, catapulting it to cult status. The kernel at the heart of this weird fruit is the opera singer herself, who radically refuses to have her voice recorded, insisting in only existing in the real. Wilhelmenia Fernandez as Cynthia Hawkins, the US singer, lends the film gravitas. Her presence cuts through the slightly hackneyed world of the French policier, and lends a poetic dimension to the journey of Jules, the postman who is obsessed by her voice. This journey is in no way conventional in story terms: we are given little insight into the protagonist’s evolution as a result of his misadventures. Rather, he glides like a note through the film which is in many ways an exercise in mise en scene, with the set piece sequences and locations knitted together into an unlikely collage. If there is a subtext to the movie, it is that meaning should remain as ephemeral as the singer’s voice. As an audience we want to capture meaning, possess it, but just as Cynthia Hawkins resists being recorded, so the real meaning of Jules’ adventure escapes us. The subplot of the vice ring is nothing more than a motor to keep the film ticking, to arrive at the point where the singer is confronted by the beauty of her own voice for the very first time.
Ps it is lovely to see a still distressed Bouffes du Nord theatre make an appearance, and the use of this theatre as a magical space is another key element in the film. At one point we see Hawkins singing from the point of view of Jules, and the back of a few heads seem to interrupt our vision. For a tiny moment, it feels as though those heads might be in our theatre, or cinema: we are placed in Jules’ seat, present for the sound of a miracle.
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