I hope you’ll excuse a moment of self-indulgent sentimentality as I try to recall what it was to share a walk in the park before the days of friends and partners addicted to cellphones.

I’m not given to nostalgia, but in watching the 1981 movie Diva by director Jean-Jacques Beineix it’s easy to relate to a gentler time when cinema gave viewers the time to gaze and admire. Diva’s strange combination of sophistication and urban coolness is hard to find in some of the over-plotted celluloid offerings of the 21st century.

A scene from Diva

It was Beineix’s first solo project and adventure into the “Cinema du Look” whose palette defined the pop sheen of the 1980s, with sumptuous colour coordination and fragmented imagery informing just about everything to come in that self-conscious, “new romantic” decade, from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner to David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour concept. The films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax share the same alienated post-punk aesthetic.

Five years later, Beineix released 37°2 le matin; Betty Blue, starring the exquisite Beatrice Dalle. That was just as well because some of my peers had progressed from posing under umbrellas to exploring a different form of Eighties self-marketing, as peroxide blonds with cigarettes balanced “just so”. A good few people I knew at the time were preoccupied with self-image, even to the point of self-destruction.

Diva remains my favourite of the “Look” genre, combining all the chic postmodern imagery of Paris with the simple value of music as performance. . . long before the days of internet file sharing. In the movie, a black American opera star who refuses to have her voice reproduced discovers that her Paris concert has been recorded by a fan, a young mail courier whose tape is likely to fall into the wrong hands. The pursuit of his moped through the city streets and Metro is among the best chase sequences in cinema history.

There’s an entertaining plot with a worthy theme, of the authenticity of original performance facing the advance of music piracy. But it was the rich simplicity of the soundtrack and the film’s vibrant imagery, which had a major impact on the way European commericals were styled, that made the film so memorable. I share with you a clip of the theme, Sentimental Promende, by composer Vladimir Cosma.

Tags: Betty Blue, cinema, Cinema du Look, Diva, film, Jean-Jacques Beineix
Categories: culture

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 7.14 pm and is filed under culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.