Looking for '80s style? 'Diva' delivers.

The feature debut of Jean-Jacques Beineix, who'd go on to "The Moon in the Gutter" and "Betty Blue," "Diva" seemed to encapsulate the scrappy chic of post-punk/post-modern Euroculture: It deconstructed genre cliches just for the hell of it, then recombined them into something shiny, shallow, and new.

Ironically (is that redundant?) the key piece of music in "Diva" is a gorgeous 19th-century aria: "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana," from "La Wally," sung in the film by an American soprano named Cynthia Hawkins (played by the American soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez). Her concert is taped by an obsessive fan - a shy, gangly Paris postman named Jules (Frederic Andrei) - and since the singer has steadfastly refused to record her voice on artistic principle, the tape becomes a sought-after object.

There's another tape - of course there is - containing a prostitute's confession implicating a criminal bigwig. In short order, Jules is being chased by a pair of Taiwanese opera-label heavies, a policewoman (Chantal Deruaz), and two menacing thugs (Gerard Darmon and Dominique Pinon).

One of the chief delights of "Diva" back in 1982 was the character of Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), a blasé Zen master who suggests Jean-Paul Sartre crossed with Superman and who turns up whenever the plot and Jules need him to. He's still a charmer, and so is his girlfriend/familiar, Alba, played by the teenage French-Vietnamese actress Thuy An Luu, but it's clearer than ever that Beineix doesn't know what to do with these two other than peek up Thuy's skirt. As with so many pop moments a quarter-century on, what once looked sexy now smells a little sexist.