The “cinema de look” tag that has long been attached to Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva” makes the 1981 pop thriller sound like a dazzling play of surfaces without content. Yes, its opera-loving postman hero lives in a shabby-chic industrial space decorated with billboard murals and automotive flotsam, and many shots are composed in a self-consciously playful or artful manner, reflected in a helmet here or shades there, slick with the decade’s signature cool blues, plastic reds, and perfume-ad sheen.

But besides the flair of the”look,” it’s the film’s quaint bohemianism in the age of copyright that eases the tedious, tangled plot. For this debut feature, which starts a two-week revival today at Film Forum, Mr. Beineix gives us Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a young opera devotee who secretly records his favorite diva at a live concert. Cynthia Hawkins (soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez, in her only film role) has never set foot in a studio, but Jules can now dream to her music in the comfort of home.

The bootleg remains a tender, secret passion, even as diva and fan strike up an improbable companionship after recognizing the obsessiveness of the other. But the recording and Jules’s tale are shadowed by a parallel yarn about another illicit tape, a piece of incriminating evidence sought by police and a cartoonish pair of thugs. One mix-up for oblivious Jules, and voilá, run-of-the-mill suspense ensues in eye-catching ways, including a moped chase through the Metro.

Mostly, though, “Diva” is an excuse to gaze at still-lifes, both conceptual and visual. Jules meets another art-lover, spunky Vietnamese teenager Alba (Thuy An Luu), who slips shoplifted records into her portfolio of nudes — and then razzes the clerk for sneaking a peek. Her pal Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) lounges in a cavernous, spare loft (real estate value unknown), set off by a gleaming bathtub and an executive-toy seesaw sculpture filled with liquid. Gorodish’s alabaster Rolls-Royce keeps popping up (in a forest, by a lighthouse) as he plays rumpled savior to the pursued Jules.

These magazine-ad compositions and juxtapositions (shot by Philippe Rousselot) are not the novelty they once were. (Even then, Ridley Scott’s iconically glossy Chanel ads and MTV were close contemporaries.) The film’s particular strain of romanticism, which would also bloom in fellow cinema-de-lookers Luc Besson and, more convincingly, Leos Carax, may feel overexposed, too. But it was stylish in its time, and is now a reminder of how the concept of “stylish” will pop up as incomplete journalistic shorthand for skillful artifice. (Witness its next iteration in the reviews of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers in the 1990s.)

But there’s always Jules, amiably game in his postman’s cap, as our guileless companion for the film’s running dialogue with classical beauty in sound and vision. Mr. Beineix opens his film with a short montage, playing the noble lines of a winged sculpture off the curves of Jules’s moped helmet. Later, Jules and Cynthia stroll at daybreak by Paris monuments rendered intimate by the deep-blue dawn.

Around the same time, Jean-Luc Godard would also emerge from the scrabbly ’70s to exult in voluptuous color and classical painting in “Passion” — but Mr. Beineix vehemently pronounced himself part of a newer wave. (“Jules? That’s an old man’s name!” laughs Cynthia, and one thinks perhaps of Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim.”) And there’s some sort of tweak on conservative tastes when Dominique Pinon’s smash-faced hood, who constantly wears an earpiece and monosyllabically criticizes everything, turns out to be listening to hokey accordion ditties.

Following up with the shrill “Moon in the Gutter,” Mr. Beineix would hit the mark again only once, with “Betty Blue” in 1986, but a turn to documentaries yielded a powerful look at stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby (subject of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which opens next month). Even “Diva” took a while to take off. More recently, it’s been a creepy-covered fixture on the cult-video shelf and a sometime postmodern exhibit in academic film studies. Such a fate overlaps a little with Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” of all things, which Mr. Beineix has claimed he was offered to direct during a requisite Hollywood sojourn. And it’s the two films’ common refrain — concerns with duplication and the purity of experience — that makes Mr. Beineix’s “stylish” affair bearable, when the flash and sass tempt derision. Maybe those amount to pop intellectualism, too, but Mr. Beineix at least knows how to end his film, allowing the diva’s glorious voice to continue in the darkness even after the credits have rolled.

Through November 20 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).