Film Screening — Diva

"A single misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising motorcycle-and-moped chase through the Métro — hotly pursued by a drug dealer’s hit team, ruthless Taiwanese music pirates, and the obviously outmanned flics: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the never-recorded opera super-star Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, singing an aria from obscure 19th composer Alfredo Catalani’s The Wally. Longtime assistant director Beineix’s debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best First Film, Best Music, Best Sound, and Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography), and singlehandledly launching the cinéma du look, an explosion of visually stunning, punk-inspired, super-cool French movies in the early 80s, soon followed by the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax." — Film Forum

"For his first feature, Jean-Jacques Beineix borrowed the formal innovations of the French avant-garde—Godard’s colors and conflicting tones, Rivette’s screwball thriller plotting—for a work of unalloyed entertainment, which was such a sharp commercial idea it’s a wonder no one had thought of it before." — Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

(Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981, 117 min, France, French with English subtitles, New 4K DCP restoration)