Diva

Diva is a 1981 French thriller film directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, adapted from the novel Diva by Daniel Odier. It eschewed the realist mood of 1970s French cinema and instead adopted a colourful, melodic style, later described as cinéma du look. The film made a successful debut in France in 1981 with 2,281,569 admissions, and had success in the U.S. the next year, grossing $2,678,103. The film was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 54th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. Diva became a cult classic and was internationally acclaimed. Plot A young Parisian postman, Jules, is obsessed with opera, and particularly with Cynthia Hawkins, a beautiful and celebrated American soprano who has never allowed her singing to be recorded. Jules attends a recital at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, where Hawkins sings the aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana from the opera La Wally. He covertly makes a high-quality bootleg recording of her performance using a Nagra professional tape-recorder. Afterwards, he steals the gown she was wearing from her dressing room. Later, Jules accidentally comes into possession of an audio cassette with the recorded testimony of a prostitute, Nadia, which exposes a senior police officer, Commissaire divisionnaire Jean Saporta, as being the boss of a drug trafficking and prostitution racket. Nadia drops the cassette in the bag of the postman's moped moments before she is killed by Saporta's two henchmen—L' Antillais and Le Curé ("The West Indian" and "The Priest").