Leaping back and forth among the decades as if he's lost control of his Wayback Machine, Dahan turns the life of Edith Piaf into a confusing jumble. Marion Cotillard gives a tremendous performance as Piaf, and the movie is worth seeing (but only barely) for her alone.
It's a compelling life story. Piaf grew up in near-Dickensian misery, literally raised by whores (her grandmother was a madam) and circus freaks (daddy was a contortionist), singing on the street for change before she reached her teens. She was discovered there by impresario Louis Leplee (played here by Gerard Depardieu), who gave her the name "Piaf" (French for "sparrow") and made her the talk of the Parisian cabaret circle; she would later be acquitted of being an accessory to Leplee's murder.
During World War II, she worked with the French Resistance, and helped dozens of French prisoners of war escape from Germany. She married twice; the great love of her life, though, was married boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), killed in a plane crash in 1949. His death, and the injuries she suffered in a 1951 car accident, led to a morphine addiction that was largely responsible for her death at the age of 47.
For that summary of Piaf's life, I turned to Wikipedia. I had to, because much of it isn't in the movie -- nothing about Leplee's murder, nothing about the French Resistance (hell, WWII isn't mentioned at all, which is quite a trick for a movie set in France), nothing about her marriages -- and what is there is presented in so jumbled a fashion that it's impossible to keep track of what's happening when.
But Cotillard's performance as Piaf is a marvel. She doesn't sing -- Piaf's own recordings are used -- but you'd never guess; her recreation of Piaf's physical presence is impeccable. There's a montage of Piaf's first theatrical performance (as opposed to cabaret), in which we hear nothing of Piaf, just the orchestral score, as we watch Cotillard. She begins the evening stiff and uncomfortable, still not used to performing for so large an audience, and becomes more animated as the performance progresses; by the end of the scene, she's gesturing to the crowd and selling the songs with facial expressions.
In her final years, Piaf was frail and so physically unreliable that her managers were reluctant to commit to any performances; the insurance and cancellation fees were piling up. The final performance we see in the movie -- its final scene -- comes only two or three years before her death, and it is presented as the first performance of her signature song, "Non, je ne regrette rien." Cotillard totters onto stage, barely able to walk without falling, and sings the song -- "No, I have no regrets" -- with defiance and determination; it is a tremendously powerful moment, and a stirring conclusion to the film, one that makes you wonder what the movie might have been had Dahan been more interested in linear narrative and less interested in presenting a chronological kaleidoscope.
(Kudos, by the way, to the movie's makeup team. Cotillard plays Piaf over roughly the last 25 years of her life, and the aging never looks false, even in Piaf's final days, when she looked a good 20 years older than she was.)
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