DIVA reissue! French cult classic in new 35mm print! December 7, 2007

Landmark’s Lumiere Theatre – 1572 California St., San Francisco, (415) 267-4893
Tickets are $9.75 for general admission and $7.75 seniors and children
Showtimes available Tuesday, December 4 at http://www.landmarktheatres.com/
Advance ticket purchase at: http://www.landmarktheatres.com/tickets and at theatre box office.

Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas – 2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, (510) 464-5980
Tickets are $9.50 for general admission and $7.50 seniors and children
Showtimes available Tuesday, December 4 at http://www.landmarktheatres.com/
Advance ticket purchase at: http://www.landmarktheatres.com/tickets and at theatre box office.

“The movie's mad excitement hinges entirely on the pleasure to be had in moving our eye from one gorgeously composed stage set of artifice to another.” – Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

“A brash, snazzy thriller! Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as "cinéma du look," a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the '80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.” – Nathan Lee, The Village Voice

“A postmodern classic! Beineix’s reprinted and retranslated directorial debut looks and sounds superb, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography…Flows between its romance, drama and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.” – Benjamin Sutton, New York Press

“Like something beamed down from the planet of cool! Diva seems organic through and through.What could be more natural than the juxtaposition of the industrial and the New Wave? …this is style as a force of nature!” – David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“Terrific… One of the most persistently entertaining, absorbing and scary thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.” - Roger Ebert

“Divine Madness… A thriller with a new way of looking at the world — through a glass, brightly.” - Michael Sragow

“If Diva is about anything, it is about the joy of making movies. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience.” - Pauline Kael

DIVA, the sensational debut of director Jean-Jacques Beineix and the film that launched a second new wave of French cinema, is now shown in a new 35mm print – the first since its original U.S. release 25 years ago – and with a new translation that fully captures the film’s irreverent wit.

Just one lousy misstep, and reedy 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 blond, sun-glassed Dominique Pinon, wielding the world’s most vicious awl); ruthless Taiwanese music pirates; and the obviously outmanned flics 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…

Longtime assistant director Beineix’s debut was an international arthouse sensation, playing for over a year in some cinemas, nabbing four French Césars (including Best First Film and Philippe Rousselot’s cinematography), and single-handedly 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 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 near-pre-pubescent 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 starred). Adapted from the novel by the pseudonymous “Delacorta,” one of a series featuring Gorodish and Alba.

Official Website: http://www.rialtopictures.com/diva.html