Jean-Jacques Beineix, the director of “Diva,” has died.
If you’ve seen “Diva,” I’m sure your memory needs no refreshing. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a fatally cool, colorful, post-New Wave French thriller, featuring Ray-Ban wearing punk gangsters, a moped-riding mailman obsessed with opera, and Philadelphia soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, who sings the big aria from Alfredo Catalani’s “La Wally.” The rest of the soundtrack, which I was able to purchase at the local mall (!), was composed by Vladimir Cosma.
I remember reading an effusive review of the film in David Denby’s column in New York Magazine and so very badly wanting to see it, figuring I never would, since (1) it was French, (2) it was 1981, and (3) I was 15 and living in the Lehigh Valley. There was no internet at the time and home video availability in those days, you’ll recall, was spotty at best. Even if I could find it, the purchase of a foreign film would have been prohibitively expensive.
O me of little faith! I hadn’t banked on the Allentown art house, the 19th Street Theatre (now the Civic Theatre of Allentown). 19th Street was where I could see films like “El Norte,” “Fitzcarraldo,” and “My Brilliant Career,” when, living in a small town, you couldn’t expect to see them anywhere else – unless they happened to turn up later at one of the local universities. It was at 19th Street that I first saw “Diva.”
Then, what do you know, in the mid-‘80s, it became a favorite on WHYY, Philadelphia’s public television station, so I was able to see it again and again. In the interim, I watched it on the big screen a second time in college and then at Philadelphia’s greatly missed (Theater of the Living Arts (TLA) on South Street, back in the days when it was still the city’s best movie house. I used to hit that theater three times a week. $2.50 admission with my student I.D.
On weekdays, the double features were changed every other day, with the biggest draws, the cult favorites and crowd-pleasing classics, saved for the three-day weekend.
“Diva” was one fun, sharp-looking film – a foreign movie for people who think they don’t like foreign movies. Kind of to the early ‘80s what “Run, Lola, Run” was to the late ‘90s.
It’s sobering to reflect that Beineix, 75 years-old at the time of his death, was in his early 30s when he made “Diva.” Mon Dieu, how time flies.
Wiggins sings “La Wally”
The film’s trailer
Beineix obituary in Variety
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