La Vie en Rose

Peter Bradshaw
Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian


 

I have to say I regret a few things after watching this formless and weirdly selective bio-pic of Edith Piaf. It's an anthology of scenes in search of a movie, and it really is very long. But it manages to miss out the most important period of Edith Piaf's life: living in occupied France in the second world war.

Marion Cotillard expertly impersonates the legendary singer whose passionate vibrato, like a demented car-alarm, electrified the nation. Her physical slightness, her utter unsexiness and legendary childhood poverty awoke an intense gallantry in her countrymen. Cotillard is much taller than the original but the physical transformation is impressive. The pop-eyed glare, the receding hairline, the buck-toothed grimace giving extra sibilant disdain to the insults she lavishes on her adoring entourage - it's all there. Her elbows and pelvis move together in unison for the walk: allowing her to do a kind of marionette shuffle at various speeds as she progresses from hotel room to dressing room to stage and back.

Like Sinatra, she had loved and lost, and like Garland, she was wounded by childhood memories: the wound that was also the wellspring of her strength. But unlike Garland, she had a masculine, street-fighting toughness and, incidentally, lived at a time when any fanbase of gay men could not be officially acknowledged.

In classic biopic style, the movie begins at the very end: the ageing and drug-addicted Piaf has just collapsed on stage in New York in the 1950s, and as staff panic backstage, we flash back to her desperately poor childhood and start the story from there. But the action does not anchor itself in periodic updates to Piaf's 1950s frailty. We confusingly flash back and forth: mid-career, late-career, prewar, postwar. At one stage, Piaf is looking like death in a nursing home and we find out she's only 44! Later, she will give a bittersweet, valedictory magazine interview on a California beach, and she looks a perky decade younger. How old is she now? Can the end be far away? There's a movie in here somewhere, but director Olivier Dahan and editor Richard Marizy somehow never got round to carving it out.

As a tiny girl, Edith has a mother who sings in the street for pennies; her dad is a circus performer and contortionist who leaves for the trenches in 1916, and leaves Edith in the care of his mother - who runs a brothel. Little Edith contracts conjunctivitis and goes blind, but miraculously recovers after a motherly prostitute offers prayers to Saint Theresa to intercede with Christ. With a childhood like that, the chances of becoming a management consultant or marine biologist are low; the chances, conversely, of becoming a gutsy showbiz warrior are high. Like her mother, Piaf becomes a street chanteuse, and she is belting out some favourite on the pavement one day when a fancy car pulls up and out steps a likely-looking impresario. He sizes her up in a glance; she, and we, do the same with him: Gérard Depardieu. Cotillard's look of faint resignation seems to say: it is a French film, after all. What kept him?

So Edith is on her way to fame and fortune and insecurity and lost love. But how about her career from 1940 to 1945? For reasons I can only guess at, the film just misses it out. This was the period in which Piaf sang for high-ranking Nazi officials, for which she was rewarded by being allowed to pose for photos with French PoWs, photos that were used to make fake passports for them to aid their escape.

This, surely, is a major reason why every Frenchman gets goose-bumps when Piaf sings, "Non, je ne regrette rien": she abased herself by sucking up to the Nazis, but she did it to help the Resistance. And her audience - well, whatever their personal experience of the war, they might well have thought to themselves that France collaborated with the Germans after the débacle but, like Piaf, France survived. That is why a whole generation is moved to tears of rage, and pain, and glorious defiance by her famous song. How incredible that Dahan simply misses out this period of Piaf's life, without which her music is almost meaningless. What next? A biopic of Alexander Graham Bell without the telephone? A biopic of Bobby Moore that stops in 1965 and resumes in 1967?

There are good moments of course: mainly concerning her great love affair with the married boxer Marcel Cerdan. Dahan's camera stops at the bedroom door for the romantic moments (showing Piaf having sex would be unthinkable, almost incestuous) yet for the non-sexual scenes of breakdown and discord, it blunders in to witness the mess - including the spent needles - all over the bedroom floor. It was fitting, he indirectly suggests, for Piaf to fall for a boxer, because this ferocious flyweight is much more of a pugilist than he is. This is a great performance from Cotillard: but the film itself is a wasted opportunity.

 

blunder – błąkać się, iść po omacku

buck-tooth – wystające zęby

chanteuse - śpiewaczka

collapse - przewracać

conjunctivitis – zapalenie spojówek

contortionist – człowiek-guma

conversely - odwrotnie

demented - obłąkany

discord – niezgoda, kłótnia

disdain - pogarda

entourage - towarzystwo

expertly - wprawnie

ferocious – okrutny, dziki, brutalny

flash back – wracać do scen z przeszłości

frailty – słabość, wątłość

gallantry – rycerskość, uprzejmość

goose-bumps – gęsia skórka

gutsy – mocny, odważny

incestuous - kazirodczy

intercede with- wstawiać się u

lavish - rozdawać

pelvis - miednica

perky – pełen wigoru, dziarski, żwawy

pugilist – bokser, pięściarz

receding – przerzedzające się (o włosach)

sibilant - syczący

slightness – kruchość, delikatność

utter – całkowity, absolutny

valedictory - pożegnalny

vibrato - wibrato

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