Diva (1981)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
Jules, a young Parisian postman, secretly records a concert performance given by the opera singer Cynthia Hawkins, whom he idolises. The following day, Jules runs into a woman who is being pursued by armed thugs. Before she is killed, the woman slips an audio cassette into his mail bag...
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What critics compared Diva to
In the same way that Baby Driver wore itself out (Wright’s overswing swept past the romantic coming-of-age splendor of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva that he unconsciously imitated), Last Night in Soho exaggerates the macabre erotic undercurrents of Repulsion, Die, Die, My Darling!, and even the slashings of Dressed to Kill .
There was a French style of filmmaking in the 1980s called, disparagingly by some, the “cinéma du look,” its prima exemplar Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” (1981).
In its somewhat Melvillean views of Taipei after dark, neon-lit as the title suggests, and its story of outsider youth zipping around on motorbikes between crime sprees and bursts of sex, Rebels offers a funky nightscape of a film that, very roughly speaking, is to early Nineties Taipei what Jean-Jacques Beineix’s more comic-strip-styled Diva was to Paris a decade earlier.
She's not an exotic out of Diva, though you'll recognize the violent poetry of that Beineix masterpiece in the imagery.
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Sitting through his earlier, monotonous Subway (1985) and this new, more enjoyable, but still naggingly shallow film, I've sometimes gotten the feeling that he's seen only one movie in his life Jean-Jacques Beineix's smash hit, Diva.
Beineix, along with Luc Besson (Subway, La Femme Nikita) and Leos Carax (Bad Blood), was tagged as a director whose films of the 1980s have the ravishing high gloss and urban chic of a magazine fashion spread.
Jean-Jacques Beineix's smash hit, Diva.
Beineix made his directing debut with Diva, and went on to make the revered eroto-classic Betty Blue (and also, it turns out, a 1997 version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for French television).
Jean-Jacques Beineix ("The Moon in the Gutter"/"Betty Blue"), in his debut as a director, earns a place on the international scene with this intelligent, gripping and slick French thriller.
Beineix, whose slickly designed "Diva" launched the film movement known as the "cinema du look," contrasts tranquil landscapes against busy, hothouse interiors where the lovers' psychodrama plays out.
Though he hasn't made a film since 2001, New York art houses are ensuring we don't forget "cinéma du look" architect Jean-Jacques Beineix: Film Forum revived his 1981 debut, Diva, in 2007, and now Cinema Village presents the 185-minute version of Beineix's third film, 1986's Betty Blue.
Jean-Jacques Beineix rocketed to cinematic stardom with the colorful, swirling 1981 film Diva, then fell to Earth with the oppressive The Moon in the Gutter.
The name of the movie is "Betty Blue," and it is the third work by the Frenchman whose first film was the electrifying " Diva " and whose second was the baffling " The Moon in the Gutter ."