Sometimes an artwork will assume a significance out of all proportion to one's substantial recollections of it; the film Diva is one such for me. I saw Diva during a high school French excursion, probably in year 11, though it could've been a year on either side of that, and although my overall sense of the film is blurry and indistinct, a lot of individual fragments have stuck, and quite vividly so - a Vietnamese girl on roller skates wearing a transparent plastic raincoat, an artily converted warehouse (possibly my first exposure to that idea), motor scooters, mysterious pursuers, guns, surreptitious recordings of music, and the singing of the eponymous diva herself - along with an overriding impression that it was all too cool for words. I don't know why it's stuck with me, but somehow it has.
Somewhere along the line, I managed to procure a cd copy of the soundtrack, but it's never made much of an impression; yesterday, though, I happened across a cheap secondhand vinyl copy of the 'bande originale' and, motivated more by the curious sense of significance with which I've imbued the film and a vague memory-trace of records being significant within it than by any particular need to own it in this other form, bought the thing (also, I'd received news of an unexpected windfall earlier that day). And, for whatever reason, it's sunk in a bit more now, its mix of the opera diva Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez's singing of "La Wally", the melancholically pretty piano piece "Promenade Sentimentale" (performed by soundtrack composer Vladimir Cosma) and assorted atmospheric instrumental/electronic pieces (for which the term 'soundtrack music' could practically have been invented) grabbing me a little, particularly in conjunction with those scattered recollections of the film it scores.
