Éric Serra & Inva Mula – The Diva Dance
1997 · Directed by Luc Besson
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Best comments
1.“This is what a concert looks like in Area 51.”
More comments
- 2.“Fun fact: this song was written to be technically impossible to sing. The singer came in, read the music, and sang 85% of what the composer thought was impossible. The rest was added in post.”
- 3.“As a child, this was one of the weirdest and most sexually confusing things I ever saw on TV.”
The story
A blue-skinned alien diva with tentacles sprouting from her head walks onto a stage in outer space and sings Donizetti. Then the opera turns into a dance track. That's the scene everybody remembers from Luc Besson's 1997 sci-fi romp The Fifth Element, and this is the full version.
The diva, Plavalaguna, is played by French actress Maïwenn, who was married to Besson at the time. She almost wasn't in it. She turned the part down at first, worried that working together would hurt the marriage, so Besson cast a German model. The model missed her costume fitting and makeup test in London and then couldn't be reached. Maïwenn offered to step in, and filming started two days later. The marriage ended during the shoot. Nobody could script it better.
She's lip-syncing. The voice belongs to Albanian soprano Inva Mula, singing the mad-scene aria Il dolce suono from Lucia di Lammermoor, and composer Éric Serra flips it into The Diva Dance, an opera-meets-club number. Legend held that no human could hit the fastest runs, so parts of the vocal were built electronically. Kazakh singer Dimash Kudaibergen later sang it anyway. The concert itself was shot at London's Royal Opera House.
Critics split on the movie. Roger Ebert called it one of the great goofy movies. It made more than $263 million anyway and settled in as a sci-fi cult classic, with Jean Paul Gaultier's costumes all over it. The diva gets a few minutes of screen time and walks off with the whole film.
