Diva is a great film. It has everything you could want: action, romance, corrupt cops, honorable thieves and plenty of setbacks to be overcome. This stylish thriller from the early 80s reset what a person could expect from a French film and introduced the cinema du look.
An opera star is afraid of losing her voice but unwilling to be recorded. A young Parisian messenger boy manages to sneak a high quality recording device into one of her performances. A group of Taiwanese recording executives become aware of the tapes existence and begin to hunt the messenger down.
In the meantime, a prostitute manages to drop a recording of her confession against a corrupt police official into the messenger’s bag just before she is killed. Poor Jules is being hunted for two recordings, but only knows about one.
Fortunately, he is aided by a young, Vietnamese shoplifter who has her own connections to shady characters. There is a great chase scene on a motorcycle in the subway. And Jules is hunted down through an arcade like a wild animal.
This is a movie full of desperately lonely people who are all yearning to find some one or some thing to connect to. Jules has a one-sided love affair with an opera singer who doesn’t know he exists. The Diva has cut herself from everyone, because she is afraid they are taking advantage of her. Alba, the Vietnamese girl is very young but act like a woman twice her age. Despite a surface friendliness, she too is afraid of getting hurt if someone gets too close to her.
The optimism of this movie is a projection of the viewer that these people will be able to change. That they will become aware of their own shortcomings and learn to let people break through the barriers they have constructed around themselves is implied, but not specifically stated.