Diva (1981 film)
| Diva | |
|---|---|
Film poster
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| Directed by | Jean-Jacques Beineix |
| Produced by |
Claudie Ossard Irène Silberman Serge Silberman |
| Screenplay by | Jean-Jacques Beineix Jean Van Hamme |
| Based on |
Diva by Delacorta |
| Starring |
Frédéric Andréi Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez Richard Bohringer |
| Music by | Vladimir Cosma |
| Cinematography | Philippe Rousselot |
| Edited by | Monique Prim Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte |
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Production
company |
Les Films Galaxie
Greenwich Film Productions |
| Distributed by | Compagnie Commerciale Française Cinématographique |
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Release date
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Running time
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117 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French English |
| Budget | $1.5 million |
| Box office | $19.8 million< |
Diva is a 1981 French thriller film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, adapted from the novel Diva by Daniel Odier (under the pseudonym Delacorta). It is one of the first French films to let go of the realist mood of 1970s French cinema and return to a colourful, melodic style, later described as cinéma du look.
The film made a successful debut in France in 1981 with 2,281,569 admissions, and had success in the US the next year grossing $2,678,103. The film became a cult classic and was internationally acclaimed.
A young Parisian postman, Jules, is obsessed with classical music; he is particularly obsessed with Cynthia Hawkins, a beautiful and celebrated American soprano opera singer who has never allowed her singing to be recorded. Jules attends a recital at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where Hawkins sings the aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana" from the opera La Wally. He illicitly makes a high-quality bootleg recording of her performance using a Nagra professional tape-recorder. Afterwards, he steals the gown she was wearing from her dressing room.
Later, Jules accidentally comes into possession of an audio cassette with the recorded testimony of a prostitute, Nadia, which exposes a senior police officer, Commissaire divisionnaire Jean Saporta, as being the boss of a drug trafficking and prostitution racket. Nadia drops the cassette in the bag of the postman's moped moments before she is killed by Saporta's two henchmen - L' Antillais and Le Curé ("The West Indian" and "The Priest").
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