Those familiar with Édith Piaf will know the title as that of her best-known song. Olivier Dahan’s film is an impressionistic depiction of the less-than-rosy life of the French singer, whose rough American analog would be her contemporary Judy Garland, but who in her native country is regarded as Sinatra is in his. Her nickname, Little Sparrow, reflects her diminutive stature and, perhaps, her emotional fragility, rather than her vocal quality, which retained its power even as arthritis and cancer ravaged her body toward the end of her life. Although, unlike the recent Ray and Walk the Line, the picture covers the whole span of its subject’s life, it feels sculpted, more memoir than biography.
In another departure from most biopics, the mood is not triumphant, though Piaf does overcome much adversity. The film sort of proceeds chronologically, but begins in 1959 with her collapsing on stage near the end of her career, and periodically flashes forward to spotlight her later years of physical decline—in her 40s, she looks much older—combined with a continued desire to sing. Except for the scenes of Édith’s unstable childhood, she is played by Marion Cotillard (Russell Crowe’s love interest in A Good Year). Even if you’re not especially familiar with Piaf, as I was not, it’s impossible not be blown away by the actress, who immersed herself in her subject’s life for months prior to filming. Whether depicting the rag-doll teen Édith—she’s not yet called Piaf—busking in the streets of Paris, or the hunched figure still inspired by a young songwriter, Cotillard empathetically projects the singer’s steely determination combined with a vulnerability that never disappeared even as she adjusted comfortably to the life of a celebrity. The make-up people deserve a lot of credit too; if I hadn’t know otherwise, I really might have thought a different actress played the older Piaf. As for the singing, it is (nearly all) Piaf herself, but the lip-syncing is flawless.
Dahan hits many of Piaf’s career highlights—her first recording, her association with Jean Cocteau, who wrote a play for her, her hard-won success in New York—but on the whole, the emphasis is far more on the personal. Absent, for example, are her mentoring of such figures as Yves Montand, one of her many lovers, and Charles Aznavour, her interesting role in the French Resistance (photos of her with POWs were used to create fake passports), or her funeral, which halted traffic in Paris. Until I saw the closing credits, I hadn’t even realized she’d written the lyrics for “La vie en rose” and other songs. Other characters in the film come and go—Louis Leplée, the nightclub singer who discovered her (Gérard Depardieu), her longtime friend Mômone (Sylvie Testud), and Marcel Cerdan, the boxing champion she loved. But the image Dehan leaves us with is Piaf alone, on stage, singing her 1960 hit “Non, je ne regrette rien.” (“No, I regret nothing.”)
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written 7/15/07
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