Diva
1981, directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
Diva is a strange kind of love story. It seems to end on a note of romance between the postman Jules and opera singer Cynthia Hawkins, but they never kiss. Even while drawing closer to her, he had flirted with Alba and visited a prostitute, and when he spends a night in her hotel room they don’t share a bed. The arc of their story is not so much about the formation of a couple as it is about their achievement of intimacy. The ending comes full circle, mirroring the opening scene – the same aria from La Wally, set once again in a grand yet dilapidated theater – but with two key differences: Jules has moved onto the stage, and Cynthia Hawkins has become an audience to her own voice. It’s not that they’ve exchanged places, but rather that each has entered the other’s world, uniting them more than just physically.
The real arc, therefore, is between two different experiences of music. Diva begins with a series of typical musical encounters – the background to a ride, a concert performance, home listening – but even in the live performance we can see where the experience falls short. For all of Cynthia’s talent, and for all of Jules’ reverence for her and her singing, there’s a gulf between listener and performer that’s symptomatic of a gulf between the person and the music.
During the titles, for two minutes before Cynthia Hawkins steps onstage, Jules plays the opera Faust on his way to the concert. Faust is about a man who wants what he’s not entitled to possess, and the same goes for Jules. He’ll steal the diva’s robe, and he’ll steal her voice. Neither the woman (of whom the robe is a fetish token) nor the music can possibly belong to him, at least not in the way he wants, and he’ll end up returning both. Though Jules makes the recording for private use, his possessive impulse is not essentially different from that of the two Taiwanese pirates who sit behind him and chase after the recording.
It would seem at least that Jules, in contrast to the two pirates, is a genuine fan of Cynthia Hawkins, but that does not absolve him. The Taiwanese may well admire her singing too. “Diva” is Latin for “goddess”, and the film’s point is that worship doesn’t do an artist or the art any favors. Worship drives a wedge between audience and performer, between listener and music, and ironically it commodifies its object, inspiring a desire to own and control the thing worshipped. Diva traces Jules’ journey from this immature reverence to a mature engagement. In his adventure, he will inadvertently live through an opera instead of merely listening to one.
When Alba visits Jules’ loft, she asks him, “So, am I coloratura or lyric?” and he answers, “You’re more the dramatic type,” alluding to the historic distinction between the ornamental bel canto style of Rossini, Bellini, or Donizetti and the “dramatic” style of Verdi and his successors. Later this distinction will become more than academic as Jules lives out the difference in two chase scenes. When a cop chases him through the subway system, the ups and downs of the stairs and escalators are like a coloratura melody from a bel canto opera, the wheels of his motorbike like a pair of beamed notes riding the scales. When Saporta’s goons chase him from Avenue Foch into the parking garage, the long straight passages are like a dramatic opera. The first chase is “ornamental” in the sense that the stakes are low. In the “dramatic” chase his life is in actual danger.
Like an opera’s cast, the leading roles of Diva are picked for their voices. There’s a soprano (Cynthia Hawkins), a tenor (Jules), a bass (Saporta), a soubrette (Alba), and a baritone (Gorodish). Saporta is introduced at work in the police station, but connoisseurs of Tosca will recognize from the slow tolling of a bell outside that he must be the villain. The cavernous loft apartments, the lighthouse, and the abandoned factory are like opera sets, with Gorodish standing high on a catwalk like so many opera characters. At the action climax, Saporta ascends a car elevator, preceded by his shadow like Mephistopheles rising onto an opera stage. The number of wheels and spinning circles onscreen make Diva like a book of sheet music brought to life, its musical notes materialized in a real world of mopeds, trains, cars, roller skates, tape reels, elevator pulleys, the prostitute’s lamp, a carnival roulette wheel, etc.
All these physical and dramatic correlatives to musical convention are symbolic of something greater. A pattern of duality runs through Diva, to such an extent that almost everything has some twin or counterpart somewhere. The plot is built around two highly coveted tapes. Jules steals two things from Cynthia Hawkins, and Alba is also a thief. There are two run-down theaters, chase scenes, Taiwanese pirates, good cops, stooges of Saporta, blue waves, white Citroëns, parking garages, loft apartments, magic birds, fiery explosions, barefoot women, black women, and people killed with awls. The Garnier opera house appears on Alba’s skirt, then at the end of the Métro chase. Twice Jules puts his hand on Cynthia’s shoulder. Jules plays a tape of Gounod’s Faust, and Hawkins sings Gounod’s Ave Maria. Alba’s story on the phone is full of images (the seaside, a sailboat, a bell, nudity, a blue wave) that are echoed elsewhere in Diva. The final scene, when Jules comes down from the theater’s control booth to come clean about his illicit recording, restages Gorodish’s descent from the factory’s catwalk to give the other tape to Saporta.
The underlying duality that all of these doublings reflect and point to can be read two different ways (another duality) equally well. There’s the duality between two people that intimacy seeks to bridge, and there’s an equivalent duality between the listener and music, or between audience and art. The latter must also be bridged by a kind of intimacy that comes from genuine engagement.
By the end, having lived through the figurative opera of his adventure, Jules is ready to experience the Catalani aria on a new level. The story of his journey is built around two hotly pursued tape recordings, but the two tapes represent a deeper duality between reality and fantasy. The musical tape is real in the sense that Jules made it himself. Nadia Kalansky’s tape is external to his story, a crazy coincidence inserted into the plot, an artificial layer of drama akin to the fantasy that a crime movie offers its viewers. For a young man like Jules who’s inclined to steal, the idea of crime represents a rush of excitement. The humble postman becomes the notorious subject of newspaper headlines, the mysterious thief who stole a diva’s robe. The parallel thread concerning the corrupt police chief, drugs, and human trafficking magnifies the stakes, thrusting Jules into a criminal plot beyond his imagining, and he finds himself helpless, shot in the shoulder, reduced to a desperate call for help in a phone booth. Jules must pass through this crime fantasy, coming out at the other end to find its disappointing outcome, in order to grow out of his boyish wish.
Gorodish is another fantasy element, a deus ex machina no less artificial than the Kalansky tape, an impossibly heroic figure who gets Jules out of every danger. He functions as a projection of Jules’ ideal self, the man Jules would wish to be, and after luring Saporta into the elevator shaft the film drops him without an afterthought. There’s nothing else we need to know about him – but the similarity between Jules in the control booth at the end, returning the real tape to Cynthia, and Gorodish on the catwalk returning the other tape to Saporta, reinforces the impression that Gorodish is a fantasy double of Jules. The real story is what counts most, and the film returns to it at the end.
Alba too, in her way, is a fantasy double for Jules, an occasional thief like himself on the cusp of adulthood with a budding fascination for music. The most fantastic setpiece in Diva is the lighthouse, the “magic castle” where Gorodish and Alba hide Jules after he’s shot. The tower is unmistakably phallic, rising out of two testicular side wings, implying that Jules is on his way to becoming a man. It’s there that he’ll decide to return the tape to Cynthia Hawkins at whatever danger or cost of embarrassment to himself. In the same lighthouse Alba stuffs two apples into her shirt, as if also contemplating growing up. For that matter, Cynthia Hawkins also takes a step toward maturity when she finally listens to her own voice, symbolically coming to know herself for the first time.
When Jules and Cynthia come together on the stage at the end, listening to her earlier performance of “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana”, at last they’re sharing a musical experience. She’s no longer a goddess to him but a human being, and he’s no longer just a fan. Now that the musical drama of an opera is no longer some grand artifice to him, but a semblance of the experience he’s lived through, and now that she’s effectively meeting herself onstage for the first time, we can only imagine that they’re both hearing the aria with total freshness and intensity.
CONNECTIONS:
Sunrise – Film reflects the conventional form of a symphony or an opera; frequent doubling
I Was Born, But… – Recurring motif of circles
Shadow of a Doubt – Profusion of doublings that ultimately point to the duality of a couple
Roman Holiday – Intimacy achieved between a common man and a highly-placed woman after the falsehood between them is cleared up; moped ride through a European capital
Rear Window – Juvenile character who must experience the disappointing reality of a fantasy in order to grow up
Vivre sa vie – Argument for the independence of art’s subject and against the worship of art
Burning – Protagonist projects his ideal self onto a fantasy figure with whom he does not mind sharing a woman; growing up defined as an evolution from fantasy to creative appreciation