drz Interesting movie. Artistic, sensual, stylish, sometimes funny and sometimes exciting. Almost art. Then some glaring logical errors (how was the modified tape created without access to the original??) some shallow emotional and sluggish plot turns (what was the lighthouse about?) and some really implausible major events. Yet, overall enjoyable, decent acting, and the music is remarkable.

steveo122 A fun French movie concerning an opera singer who never records her work and a young fan who manages to make a tape of her performing. Another tape, this one implicating a criminal boss, is mixed into the plot and a couple of nefarious types are sent to find it. It's a quirky thriller, a bit dated now (duh) but still quite fun and well done enough to keep your attention. Wilhelmenia Fernandez is/was an 'adequate' actor but she sings beautifully and the film opens with her performance of "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana" from the opera "La Wally". Even though I know it has to have been 'enhanced' somewhat for film purposes, it's not at all far from what she does when she sings it live. In any case, it still exists as one of the best versions.

gavin6942 Two tapes, two Parisian mob killers, one corrupt policeman, an opera fan, a teenage thief, and the coolest philosopher ever filmed. All these characters twist their way through an intricate and stylish French language thriller.What I liked about this film: Dominique Pinon, in a very early role. Also, the colors that made this come across as a new wave film mixed with something more... almost like a spy thriller or a murder mystery.Roger Ebert wrote, "The movie is filled with so many small character touches, so many perfectly observed intimacies, so many visual inventions—from the sly to the grand—that the thriller plot is just a bonus. In a way, it doesn't really matter what this movie is about; Pauline Kael has compared Beineix to Orson Welles and, as Welles so often did, he has made a movie that is a feast to look at, regardless of its subject. Here is a director taking audacious chances, doing wild and unpredictable things with his camera and actors, just to celebrate movie-making."

charsobees I saw the first scene of this movie on a TV arts showcase which was going through some opera videos. I was totally intrigued; the opera was beautiful, the lighting and color consolidated the mood, and the main character, recording secretly with teary eyes, seemed like a creepy, artistically sensitive but also somewhat fanatic protagonist. I developed the delusion then that 'Diva' must be some sort of psychological, dramatic type of film, a little like Taxi Driver but not so insane, about yearning and obsession, the mystery about another human, admiration from a distance, and the...elite, or elect, or beautiful, or celebrity--the Diva--whatever you want to call it else. Instead, after the first few good minutes, which end after the main character steals the singer's dress, I was unpleasantly introduced to the actuality of this movie as a "thriller". And what a poorly written, shot, acted and edited thriller it is. It includes all sorts of bad TV show thriller clichés: multiple and switched tapes, chases, foreign mafia type of people (except this time they were having a hard on for a bootlegged cassette-- now this is interesting: the two "taiwanese" guys (apparently the ENTIRE world in this movie has a real hard on for Italian opera) WERE actually present during the first scene when the main character was recording...and yet, even though they are chasing people right and left, with sunglasses on, for the recording, they did not record it themselves!!--anyways, back to my list...) drug and prostitution dealers, inept and corrupt cops, an utter lack of understanding (or perhaps concern) of the function of a human body and how people die (or not) when stabbed, and magically and quickly faint when they are exposed to some sort of mist-spray, and REALLY REALLY REALLY awful deux ex machina. Of course, they had to cater to the majority of the critic population, so they jammed in other irrelevant "artistic" stuff. There is an "artistic" type who sits on a large bare floor while putting together a puzzle, and these slow mo shots of a wave machine keep repeatedly appearing with bad new age music in the background. Then there is a completely out of place (well, so is nearly everything else in here) and very long discussion on buttering a baguette. Everything is shot in blue to give yet another out-of-place melancholy noir feeling to a cheesy TV show plot. There are also tedious scenes involving metafiction on the medium of film with reel shapes rotating in various places. I've never liked this type of self-conscious self-reflexivity because I think art should do as a drug and kidnap its audience into its own world, not nag about its form or dress. Anyways. There is also this extremely annoying and stupid technique of panning or zooming at something peripheral during or at the end or a scene. The most stupid of these moments were when, after the main character had walked off screen, the camera takes several seconds to move towards a shot of an ordinary small pool of water. Another time, while bad guys are mishandling a character, the camera moves to a wallpainting of a little girl in a bus (??). For a movie which involves music a great deal the background music is awful. It is absent at certain moments where I think it could have benefited, but it is plenty and repetitious at certain moments when it is utterly superfluous and inappropriate. In fact, the whole recording is really botched, I'm not sure if it was lost in the transfer or what, but the ambiance and environmental sounds and totally lacking...it was as if they just recorded the dialog in an empty and bare studio. This kills any potential "thrill" considerably. Anyways, when the predictable ending played out (apparently elite sopranos are easily seduced by blank, fawning postmen) I had already lost all my reservoir for caring about the movie. Mediocre at best; in my opinion could have made a lot better of itself.