DIVA

Sunday, May 2nd at 1:00 p.m. and
Tuesday, May 4th at 7:00 p.m.
ADMISSION: FREE
**Suggested donation: $5.00**

All ESSENTIAL CINEMA films screen Sunday at 1:00 p.m. and Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., and admission is FREE!
See classic art films the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in 35 mm!

“A BRASH, SNAZZY THRILLER! Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam." - Nathan Lee, THE VILLAGE VOICE

“LIKE SOMETHING BEAMED DOWN FROM THE PLANET OF COOL! This is style as force of nature.” - David Edelstein, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

"SENSUAL, FUNNY, OUTLANDISH! This is a movie devoted strictly to the pleasure principle." - David Ansen, NEWSWEEK

“A PIECE OF DIVINE MADNESS, full of comedy, romance, opera and murder." - Michael Sragow, ROLLING STONE

Just one lousy misstep, and mild-mannered postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising car-and-moped chase through the Métro— hotly pursued by a drug dealer/white slaver/cop honcho’s hit team (including bleached blond punk Dominique Pinon, wielding the world’s most vicious awl); ruthless Taiwanese music pirates; and the obviously outmanned police themselves: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the NEVER-recorded opera super-star Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, as she wraps up a recital with an aria from obscure 19th composer Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally … and, well, maybe also because of the incriminating tape a hooker on the run from the aforementioned hit squad slipped into his mail pouch…
Director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s (BETTY BLUE, MOON IN THE GUTTER) debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best First Film and Best Cinematography), and singlehandledly launching the cinéma du look, an explosion of visually stunning, punk-inspired, super-cool French movies in the early 80s. And super-cool DIVA is, from its outlandish color scheme, with a fiery red accent in seemingly every shot; to Richard Bohringer’s contemplative but resourceful protector Gorodish, who smokes cigars in the bathtub, wears a snorkel to cook, and seems to have an endless supply of vintage creamy-white Citroën 11CVs ; and whose young Vietnamese sidekick, shoplifter Alba (Thuy An Luu), roller-skates through his cavernous digs; to the outrageous sets, including Andréi’s own car-wreck-strewn garage apartment and a pharaonic lighthouse hideout; to that haunting aria sung by American soprano Fernandez (her only film role: she was cast when the production team, looking to cast a beautiful African-American soprano who spoke French, wandered into a performance of La Bohème in which she happened to be starring).
Adapted from the novel by the pseudonymous “Delacorta,” DIVA is a wild ride into the outer limits of stylish French cinema.