Diva – The Neo Noir classic gets a new 4K restoration

A brand new 4K restoration of Diva, the influential 1982 Neo-Noir thriller by the late director Jean-Jacques Beineix, premieres at the IFC Center in New York City on Friday, August 22. The restoration will open at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles on August 29 with a national roll-out to follow.

A single misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris — including a hair-raising motorcycle-and-moped chase through the Métro — hotly pursued by a drug dealer’s hit team, ruthless Taiwanese music pirates, and the obviously outmanned flics: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the never-recorded opera super-star Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, singing an aria from obscure 19th century composer Alfredo Catalani’s The Wally.

Beineix’s directorial debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best First Film, Best Music, Best Sound, and Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography), and single-handedly launched the cinema du look, an explosion of visually stunning, punk-inspired, super-cool French movies in the early ‘80s, soon followed by the films of Luc Besson and Leos Carax.

And super-cool DIVA is, from its color scheme, with a fiery red accent in seemingly every shot; to Richard Bohringer’s contemplative Gorodish, who smokes cigars in the bathtub, wears a snorkel to cook, and seems to have an endless supply of vintage creamy-white 11 CV Citroëns; to the outrageous sets, including Gorodish’s cavernous digs and Andréi’s own car-wreck-strewn garage apartment; to that haunting aria sung by soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez (in her only film role), who died last year at the age of 76.

The new 4K restoration of DIVA was produced from the original 35mm negative and the sound negative. Scanned in 4K by TransPerfect Media, the image was then digitally graded and cleaned to remove imperfections from the original elements. The project was carried out by the Studiocanal team, Sophie Boyer and Jean-Pierre Boiget. Restoration and digitization with the support of the CNC.