Flair Ball

By RICHARD CORLISS

DIVA Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix; Screenplay by Jean-Jacques Beineix and Jean Van Hamme

Ten ways to tell the difference between style and flair in moviemaking: style reveals; flair displays. Style insinuates; flair asserts. Style is witty; flair is clever. Style seems simple; flair looks facile. Style is a bolt of lightning; flair is a ripple of Mylar. Style advances the story; flair replaces the story. Style connects images, scenes, moods, morals; flair offers a series of showy epiphanies. Style is a cloak for character; flair is a designer-jeans commercial. Style finds the right thing; flair uses everything. Style is the expression of the born moviemaker; flair is the product of the compulsive movie watcher.

Diva, a first feature by Jean-Jacques Beineix, 35, has flair to spare. No picturesque French location, from a bombed-out concert hall to a Normandy lighthouse, is too remote. No surface--water, a car hood, sunglasses--is too outre to keep it from reflecting a passerby's face. No character is too quirky to escape shoehorning into the film's delirious narrative. Jules (Frederic Andrei) is a postal messenger in love with an opera star (Wilhelmenia Fernandez)--a diva so protective of her gift that she refuses to record even her greatest triumphs. Jules will have none of this: he must live with his obsession, so he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances. But it is another recording--a prostitute's taped confession implicating several powerful bad guys--that involves Jules in a maelstrom of thriller twists. Two eccentric allies help this Candide in Hitchcockland: a roller-skating shoplifter from Viet Nam (Thuy An Luu) and a puzzle addict who chain-smokes Gitanes and practices Zen (Richard Bohringer).

It hardly matters that Diva's plot components do not parse. The best thrillers rarely traffic in linear common sense; nobody, including Raymond Chandler, ever figured out who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep. But they did evoke a world so cohesively ominous that when life and death eyeballed each other at the denouement, it mattered which one blinked first. No such laws operate in Diva. In an early scene, we see a harried woman trudging barefoot through a Metro station; she recognizes two men--a skinheaded punk and a swarthy rake--and smiles enigmatically as they pursue her out of our sight; she runs into the street and collapses, a knife in her back. So far, fine: the sequence has pace, atmosphere, humor, suspense. But the questioning child in every moviegoer wants to know more. Why the bare feet? Why the smile? Why the Metro? Beineix isn't interested in the Why?--only in the What Next?

For the better part of two hours, he keeps the viewer interested too. In this torpid movie season, Diva is to be seen and savored for Philippe Rousselot's electric-blue imagery, for Hilton McConnico's extravagant decors, even for the prodigal joy Beineix derives from parading his talent. And there are some quietly astonishing moments when, with just the touch of hand on neck, the film suggests a growing, reciprocal affection between diva and devotee. It is on these occasions that Beineix's seems a promising movie career indeed--when you can see the young man of flair beginning to unlock the secrets of style. --By Richard Corliss

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.