Dir. Olivier Dahan, France/UK/Czech Republic, 2007, 141 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Jean-Pierre Martins
Review by Carol Allen
Played by the normally very beautiful Cotillard (she played Russell Crowe's love interest in A Good Year), this, as you may have guessed from the title, is the story of French chanteuse Edith Piaf. Cotillard is amazing as Piaf, whose looks did not match her beautiful voice. And, rather as Helen Mirren did playing The Queen, she presents a startlingly accurate physical representation of this tiny, plain yet incredibly charismatic and talented women – a real performance, not a mere impression. She is particularly striking as the older Piaf, racked by the arthritis and cancer, which made her old before her time. It is a very moving moment when this frail, dying little creature, whose disintegrating body can no longer match the strength of her spirit, says that she is only 44. It's not a romanticised view of Piaf either, who is shown "warts and all", making the romance between her and the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan (Martins) all the more real.
The film has an interesting structure, which inter cuts between the first half of her life and the last, setting her childhood and years of triumph against her decline, which turns out to be a sort of "dream at the point of death", with Piaf looking back over her life.
It goes into considerable detail about her early years – her childhood in her grandmother's brothel; her relationship as a not particularly attractive child suffering from skin and eyesight problems with her surrogate mother, the prostitute Tintine; and her years on the road with her circus acrobat father – and it is time well spent. There is a scene in a market square where they are performing, when 10-year-old Piaf (Pauline Burlet) sings La Marseillaise, which is heart stopping, as of course are many of the other songs in the film.
The structure does at times however make it a bit tricky to work out where we are chronologically and considering the length of the film, which appears to be giving a comprehensive coverage of her life, it is interesting to note what the director left out. For example, if you didn't know that Piaf had many lovers, apart from a scene with her pimp early in the film, whom she refers to having slept with once, you might be left with the impression that Marcel was her only other lover. No mention of her affair with her protégé, actor Yves Montand or her first husband singer Jacques Pils, while her young second husband Théo Sarapo, gets barely a spit and a cough. More importantly as we dart around inside Piaf's life story, we find ourselves at one point in New York in 1940, where the affair with Marcel happens. No reference at all to the war in Europe and the work she did for the French resistance. The film makes it appear that she was in New York for the whole of World War II and indeed the rest of the '40s.
The art of the biopic is however partly that of selection and the most important aspect of Piaf, the songs, are there is spades, well mimed by Cotillard. Period detail is perfect throughout with good supporting performances, which include Gerard Depardieu as club owner Louis Leplée, who discovered her and in whose murder she was falsely accused of complicity, and Testud as her not always reliable best friend Mômone from her street-walking days. And in spite of its small faults, it's still a very impressive and emotionally gripping film with a virtuoso performance at its centre.
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