As time passes, it's likely that fewer and fewer people who watch this film will be able to identify the singer that once entranced millions the world over.
So, if you're an Edith Piaf fan I think you have to try your hardest to forget that as you watch Olivier Dahan's extremely hagiographic bio-pic. Because whether or not you feel cheated that the film has sacrificed aspects of the life of this seminal French balladeer who captivated audiences with her no nonsense interpretation of ordinary lives and loves, or if you're so enamored of the myth she helped to create that you'll devour anything about her, films aren't made as history lessons or to answer questions.
It's clear Dahan is clearly prejudiced in favour of Piaf - named by an early mentor after the common house-sparrow. It was an appropos name since she was well under 5' tall and as common as they come. Daughter of a street-singer whose family was no stranger to street gangs, pimps and whores, she famously spent part of her childhood in a brothel and was earning chump-change for her own street-singing while still in her teens.
For someone who stormed the music world and remained a star for some three decades, Piaf herself spiced all the myths that grew up around her. That some were based on truth isn't really the point. Dahan's film beckons you into the legend. It's as telling for what it leaves out as for what it explores: was she a Nazi sympathiser? how mutual was the passion she found in her relationship with Algerian born boxing champ Marcel Cerdan - who, incidentally was flying not to her bedside but to a rematch with Jake LaMotta to regain his middleweight crown, when his plane crashed.
There is one thing totally remarkable about the film, and that's Maion Cotillard as Edith. Although the singing you hear is either Piaf herself or soundalike Jil Aigrot, Cotillard's performance is a tour de force, following the transition from simultaneously street-wise and sassy yet heart-breakingly naive urchin to spoiled and demanding and temperamental international superstar to invincible and in pain legend crippled and prematurely aged by arthritis - Cotillard engulfs them all. She transcends the film and its unsatisfying script, fulfilling all Dahan's dreams of what it must have felt like to be Piaf.
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Demisemicenturian
Posted - 12/24/2007 : 23:26:58 I really loved this biopic, but I knew very little about Piaf and so did not have the means to identify faults in that regard. Cotillard is indeed magnificent in convincing us that a physically unattractive nobody could through her charm and talent become a megastar.
