Not quite frisson and yet...the realization that Alba would be middle-aged in 2007 gives me pause. No longer the jailbait siren on roller skates, muse to the reclusive eccentric Gorodish, possessed of an enviably nonchalant insouciance. Of course we are in a French movie; where else but in French films do heroines behave in ways unrecognizable to women who either don't happen to be French, or never get to be in French movies. Just what am I talking about? Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita. Charlotte Rampling in Swimming Pool (okay Charlotte Rampling isn't French, but she's lived in France so long she might as well be.) All these women — as much as little Alba — appear caught on screen, delivering actions that defy sense and logic, but somehow adhere to their characters' intrinsic sang froid and internal engine of mystery and allure.
And Alba is nothing if not alluring. When Jules (of course his name is Jules) first meets Alba, she is casually selecting music albums she has no intention of buying. Alba is no ordinary consumer, she is an accomplished thief. When the store clerk stops her and demands to go through the case in which she stashes the loot, she brazenly obliges with a portfolio of oversize nudie photographs of herself. Exiting the store, the camera follows Jules' gaze, fixating on a moving European monument in the form of Alba's mini-skirted derrière.
This moment, as much as the rest of the Jean-Jacques Beneix's film, feels excitingly modern. Insouciance in Asian form, Paris-style. For me, this was — is — the appeal of Diva, the 1981movie adapted from Delacorta's novel of the same name. Like everything else, Diva wears its drop-dead multiculturalism stylishly.
Diva toys with expectations, flirting with propriety. Of course there is the swooning love story of operatic proportions and postmodern irony. And the criminal element that speaks to the entire fallen demi-monde that everyone but the diva of the title herself inhabits. Between these worlds are Jules, the young chevalier on motorcycle, who transgresses the diva Cynthia Hawkins by capturing her voice on tape, yet somehow retains an air of innocence and adulation. On the other, there is Gorodish, the recluse who dreams of stopping a wave, who practices and espouses zen and the art of buttering bread, who contrives to thwart the machinations of the criminal elements that power the plot with a cool dispatch James Bond would kill for.
As a movie, it's easy to watch Diva for all its surface charms: the stylish saturated colours, the casual cynicism of the characters (hiding out from hit men, Jules takes refuge with a friend whose cat is called Ayatollah), the lyricism of the wordless scenes between Cynthia and Jules walking through Paris in the rain, scored to an insiduously melancholy scale reminiscent of Satie.
The romance at the heart of Diva — like Gorodish's slightly unsavory relationship with Alba — is tarnished, impure. Motivated by worship of the goddess he imagines Cynthia to be, Jules nevertheless violates his beloved in the most unforgivable way: he captures her voice, thereby commodifying what was once unique and ephemeral. Cynthia's gift as an artist — the intimacy she cultivates in her audience through the act of performance — is ravaged by Jules' recording, which changes the meaning of Cynthia's art, displacing her living presence with its artificial representation. The subplot involving a ring of African prostitutes replays the story in a minor key. The connection becomes explicit as Jules transforms a black prostitute into his adored "Queen of the Night" by making her wear Cynthia's stolen gown.
The despoilment of beauty — the imperfection of art — is also at the heart of the scene where Gorodish lures the corrupt police chief Saporta to his undoing. "Disorder," Gorodish intones, as he repeatedly attempts to unsettle his adversary. It's his apparent embrace of the chaotic and non-linear that is the source of Gorodish's charm, and the movie's appeal: seducing us like Alba, with its disarming layers of chic, irony, and action.
In its final scene, the diva and her devotee achieve a kind of reconciliation. No longer enmeshed by the twin evils of commercialism (incarnated by a shady Taiwanese duo) or corruption (the mismatched hitmen, the "Antillais" and bespoke "Priest"), Cynthia hears herself sing for the first time as Jules plays the offending recording. At this point, the seduction is complete. Cynthia does not reject her lover, demanding the destruction of what he has risked his life to preserve. Cynthia allows herself to be captured for the moment; she shares in Jules' selfish enjoyment of her.
Whether she herself enjoys the pleasure of her own captivity or fakes enjoyment only to please Jules is not known. The curtain in a sense comes down and the movie is over. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
