French Cinema: Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix (1981)

(contains spoilers)  An amazing film as complex and multilayered as anything done by Martin Scorcese.  In terms of plot it is fairly conventional but also rather surreal as the main character, a moped riding young Postman, Jules,  gets in waaay over his head in a complex mix of organized crime, prostitution, police corruption, and classical opera.  To begin with he makes a bootleg recording of an opera star soprano, the Diva, who for somewhat obscure reasons refuses to make any sound recordings of her voice.   Two sinister Taiwanese characters happen to be sitting right behind him when he is making his clandestine recording and they set off in hot pursuit.  Meanwhile in a police stakeout gone wrong, a woman carrying an incriminating recording shows up at a train station and drops the tape in his saddlebag just before she is killed by a knife thrown by two creepy and shadowy characters who have pursued her to her death.  The tape is gone and no one knows where it went. 

Meanwhile the postman strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Asian adolescent girl, Alba, who apparently makes a career out of shoplifting.  We first see her in a record shop where she is seen stealing an album (this is after all 1981) that she secretes into her portfolio.   Even though the shopkeeper suspects something he is unable to find anything amiss.  Instead we see a number of pictures of the girl naked in the portfolio.  She befriends the postman to whom she later presents a gold Rolex watch, which she claims was her first theft.  The postman invites her back to his pad which seems to be a kind of indoor junkyard-loft full of wrecked cars, machine tools, and his extensive recording equipment.  It is decorated with a huge murals of automobiles and damsels in distress. 

Shortly after this scene and while he is away romancing the Diva, the Taiwanese music pirates track him down to this remarkable pad and ransack the place so now it is wrecked even more.  They don't get what they want and the postman wisely decides it is time to go into hiding.   The postman has meanwhile lifted the Diva's gown and visits a prostitute whom he asks to wear it while they do whatever it is they do during such visits. 

  The two sinister characters track him down to an underground garage and wing him as he makes his escape.  His Asian adolescent friend puts him in contact with an even weirder friend, Gorodish, who is apparently very well off, drives a white citroen and in the lotus position does crossword puzzles while smoking and listening to recordings of the basso profundo mumblings of Buddhist monks.   He is the unlikely savior of the day. 

He prepares onions for his cooking using snorkeling gear, and gives impromptu cooking demonstrations with a baguette, butter, and caviar for his young postman friend on the lam.  He is, indeed, a kind of French superhero.  When the postman needs to go into hiding and convalesce he takes him to a lighthouse, priapic in its grandeur there at the seaside.  

Then he sets up a showdown with the corrupt police chief in the abandoned Citroen plant.  In a neat coincidence that seems almost an afterthought, while the police chief plants a bomb in the white Citroen he has been directed to drive.  After the exchange of tapes or whatever he thinks are the tapes, the police chief listens for the ignition sounds of the car, and triggers its explosion.  This does not kill Gorodish, but the two Taiwanese gangsters who just happen to be stealing  the car, still trying to get the tape of the Diva.    

Gorodish then rolls up a garage door nearby and voila! there is another white Citroen in which he drives away.  The man obviously has magical powers.  

Finally Jules goes back to his junkyard apartment loft where the lower level and honest police woman is holding a stakeout.   There is a shootout with the two henchmen of the corrupt Police Chief, and they fall down an elevator shaft.  Then Gorodish arrives, turns out the lights, and causes the police chief to also meet his death in the elevator shaft.  

Contrite Jules finally reveals to the Diva that it was he who had made the unauthorized recording of her, and destroys the tape.  She forgives him, and you see them striding off the stage arm in arm as La Wally plays in the background.  

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This was a very stylish and somewhat surreal action film, beautifully filmed, and memorably acted.  There was nothing very original in the plot, which like so many movies shows a character who gets in over his head in something he knows nothing about, but who, through luck and his wits and a little divine intervention comes through a very dangerous time.  How nice it would be if we had someone like Gorodish to magically save us when things get very much out of hand.   In most action films the viewer is not given the luxury to think much about the plausibility of the story in its headlong rush to a conclusion.   What is great about this film is that the characters are not as unidimensional as they often are in action films.  Unlike many action adventure films where the characters are so secondary to the special effects and stunts that you find them annoying, this one gave them life, which was an achievement.