Diva 4K 1981 Ultra HD 2160p

Jules, a young postal worker, is obsessed with opera. He gets his hands on a tape recording of his favorite mulatto opera diva, who has never been recorded before. Unexpectedly, the young man finds himself involved in a dangerous game between representatives of competing record companies and the police.

User Review
The film ‘Diva’ by Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981. A film adaptation of the novel by Swiss writer Daniel Odier. When discussing this film, it is probably worth focusing not so much on the work of the French director himself, but on 1980s cinema in general. A year before Benec's film, the release of another French film, ‘Boom’, marked the beginning of a ‘new era’ not only for French cinema, but for continental European cinema as a whole. A new era had dawned: one of commercials, music players, and computer games. The pace of life had increased, and young people took their first steps into virtual reality.

Benex continued this line, tying it not only to teen culture, but going further, unwittingly predicting the total onslaught of globalism (the characters of ‘Diva’ living in the center of Paris - an Asian woman and a Negritude woman), and, consequently, the problems of emigration (which has been a common theme in festival cinema over the last 10 years).

Neo-baroque, postmodernism—these are just terms, but the watershed had already been crossed. The “New Wave” of the 1960s and the intellectual-erotic cinema of the 1970s remained in their decades, replaced by other perspectives of the neo-romantic new wave. The combination of high art and kitsch became the style of an entire decade (but then again, “healthy bad taste” elevated to fashion is a defining feature of the 80s in general).

Diva is a mosaic panel where each frame is laid like a tile in a single fantastical system. The director decorates his work with exquisite details: here is a strange gadget, there is a cream-colored retro car, not to mention the caricature-like secondary characters, whose colorfulness overshadows the “disfigured” main characters. All this fits well into the format of a post-industrial “black thriller,” and Benex, as an avid cinephile, sprinkles the film with a heap of allusions to Gallic cinema classics.

Diva is a debut film. But a debut is a debut, and the director himself will remain in the eighties. After killing Yves Montand on the set of his film L'Île aux mastodontes in 1992, he gave up filmmaking and turned to documentaries and advertising. Returning in the new millennium with the rare nonsense noir comedy L'Aventure d'un cadavre, he demonstrated that he had completely forgotten how to make films.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (74.3 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1

Info Audio

#French: FLAC 2.0
#English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
#German: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0

Info Subtitles