Diva (1981) on Netflix
Jules, a Parisian postman, secretly records a recital by soprano Cynthia Hawkins, who allows no recordings of her voice. A wounded woman slips a cassette into the bag on his moped.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/1015,483 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jules delivers mail in Paris on a moped, and in his free time he listens to opera. He idolizes Cynthia Hawkins, the American soprano who has never allowed anyone to record her singing, so at her Paris recital he hides a tape recorder in the hall and afterwards takes the gown she wore from her dressing room. During his rounds the next day, a wounded woman fleeing two armed men pushes an audio cassette into the bag on his moped before she is killed. The cassette holds a prostitute's testimony about a drug trafficking and prostitution racket. Two police officers, Paula and Zatopek, are also hunting that cassette.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Diva (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Diva was Jean-Jacques Beineix's first feature, made after he assisted directors Claude Berri, René Clément and Claude Zidi. The producers hated the title and his 'baroque' style, and their disappointment meant the film was almost never distributed.
- Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez's singing in Diva introduced the aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana" from Catalani's opera La Wally to millions, after she had sung Musetta in La bohème at the Paris Opera in 1979.
- The lighthouse where Jules is taken by Alba and Gorodish is Phare de Gatteville on the Normandy coast, the third tallest lighthouse in the world; it is still in use, can be climbed by the public and now serves as a museum.
- Cynthia Hawkins's public recital was shot in the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, whose interior had been damaged by fire and left derelict; British director Peter Brook and French producer Micheline Rozan revived it in the 1970s and kept the rough interior.
- The meeting between Gorodish and Saporta in a disused factory was filmed at the former Citroën car factory in Paris's 15th arrondissement. It had ceased production in 1975 and was being demolished when the film was made; the site is now the Parc André-Citroën.
- In a major change from Daniel Odier's novel, which the film otherwise follows faithfully, Jules and Gorodish no longer split the money after selling the illicit tape to the highest bidder.
