Diva – Meridian Collection / 2008 Lionsgate / 117 Minutes / http://www.lionsgate.com
Irene Siberman’s Diva originally came out in 1981, and was a film adaptation of a work by Daniel Odier (under the name Delacorta). The film is fast paced, detailing where a young postal employee (played by Frederic Andrei) has audio taped a concert by an opera singer (Wilhelenia Wiggins Fernandez). This audi tape finds a brother when a prostitute slips another tape into Jules’ bag. This tape incriminates a police chief, and represents a source of dramatic tension in the movie. This is due to the fact that the police chief begins a search for Jules, who is also being chased by a group of Taiwanese tapers. The action climaxes when there is an extended chase scene that takes places through the Paris Metro.
Sometimes, it seems as if studios are more than happy to re-release an old film with virtually nothing added to the product, instead just relying on the fact that individuals will buy news things to boost sales. This is not what Lionsgate does, as their Meridian Collection has exhaustive amounts of bonus features present. The transfer of the film has been remastered at a level that Jean-Jacques Beineix’s specification, and Beineix has added a number of commentaries to specific scenes in the film. A number of interviews begin to fill out this collection, with the aforementioned Beineix, the Director of Photgraphy Philippe Rousselot, and Set Designer Hilton McConnico. I was born after Diva originally came out, and feel that the bonus content on this DVD really will imbue viewers with a sense of the context in which the movie was originally created. Of course, individuals will be able to understand what is going on if they just watch the movie, but I feel that the experience of watching the movie is further bolstered when individuals have a sense of how the movie came to be.
Lionsgate has just started the Meridian collection, which “presents significant works of world cinema in elite quality editions of the highest technical standards that celebrate their creative impactâ€, and with over 3,000 films in their collection, I can see this quarterly schedule reaching out for quite a few years. If subsequent re-releases of films are of this quality, the Meridian Collection may easily be to foreign cinema what the Criterion Collection is to more independent types of films.
Rating: 7.3/10
