French madness provides a year-end escape

The last Film Club of 2025 offered a striking contrast to our previous meeting. We moved away from the familiar comforts of a noughties box-office hit — Something’s Gotta Give — and plunged instead into the gloriously strange world of Diva, a subtitled French film from 1981.

For some, Diva proved challenging — not because of the film itself, but because the version currently available on Amazon has been very badly dubbed. The loss of the original performances and soundtrack was keenly felt. Fortunately, a few of us were able to watch the original version, squirrelled away in Tony B’s DVD collection, complete with subtitles and the authentic audio — a vastly superior experience and one that better reveals the film’s peculiar charm.

Unearthed by Patrick, Diva is at times preposterous yet strangely brilliant. It is deliberately unrealistic: a conscious reaction against the gritty realism of 1970s French cinema. Coincidences pile upon coincidences, demanding a heavy dose of suspended disbelief, but the film is no less entertaining for its contrivances — particularly in the finale, where the central villain receives his richly deserved comeuppance.

At the centre of Diva is Jules, a young Parisian postman with an obsessive love of opera and a particular devotion to Cynthia Hawkins, a reclusive American soprano who refuses to make commercial recordings. After secretly recording her performance, Jules becomes entangled in a web of crime entirely by accident. A second cassette — containing evidence that could expose a powerful criminal network — is mistakenly hidden among his belongings.

What follows is a stylish chase through Paris, as Jules is pursued by a pair of grotesque and near-cartoonish villains, while being helped (and hindered) by an eclectic cast including an enigmatic philosopher-gourmet and a coolly resourceful young woman. The plot is implausible by design, but it unfolds with such flair that logic soon becomes beside the point.

The film opens memorably with an aria from La Wally by Alfredo Catalani — a composer best remembered for this single, hauntingly beautiful piece, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana.” The opera itself is rarely staged, not least because its two lead characters perish in an avalanche, but the aria lends Diva an emotional and operatic grandeur that lingers long after the opening scene.

For many, the poor dubbing undermined the experience, but even so the film offered an enjoyable escape from reality. Its villains are exaggerated caricatures, the décor is wildly imaginative — almost theatrical, verging on the surreal — and the action sequences gleefully implausible (death by an awl thrown from 25 feet was a particular favourite).

On its release, Diva received five-star reviews and was famously described as “a piece of divine madness.” Visually beautiful and laced with moments of humour, it left us with the strong impression that the actors and crew enjoyed making it just as much as we enjoyed watching — dubbing woes notwithstanding.