I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud, but this movie is just okay and hardly the work of genius many make it out to be. I have one co-worker who calls it her favorite movie of all time, my friend Jurgen Fauth just awarded it a very rare five stars and at the time of its release my all-time favorite critic J. Hoberman (with whom I almost never break ranks) wrote “Diva is not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year, but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.” But I created JordanHoffman.com as a forum for honesty. And honestly, I just didn’t get it.
I agree that it is fun to look at, but the plot is absurd and, dare I say, a little tedious. The scenes in the neon loft with reel-to-reel tapes and Vietnamese girls on roller skates are definitely cool mis-en-scene but, I dunno. . .maybe my expectations were just too high. I’d call this a decent enough “wrong man”-type story with a pretty bad performance from the Diva of the title.
