Even someone with my minority tastes in
music can see that a failure to be moved by Edith Piaf should be
treated as evidence of a heart of stone.
La Môme, a sketchy but endearing film of her life, has been out for a
couple of weeks in France and is doing great business.
A first attempt to see it, in the cinematic backwater of La
Londes-les-Maures, ended in disappointment. If we were among no more
than five customers watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto
a month earlier, we couldn't get anywhere a seat for La Môme despite
arriving half an hour before it started.
So to neighbouring Hyères yesterday.
Bookings by phone or internet are not allowed and it's a pain to drive
all the way there and back without being sure, so we took the sad
senior citizen option and turned up in good time for the 4.45pm
screening at the Olbia.
A man some way to my right snored gently, and I couldn't help noticing
that a young woman, who arrived in a short skirt and sat nearby, left
at the end wearing jeans. But whatever drove him to his slumber, and
her to seize an opportunity to change, I was hooked from the opening
sequence showing Piaf as a grubby Parisian street urchin.
The plot darted this way and that through a life of glorious tragedy,
her downfall predetermined by lifelong attachment to the bottle and
eventually addiction to drugs.
I am sure it must barely have scraped at the surface, and the
zig-zagging chronology was liable to induce dizziness.
For the purposes of the soundtrack, the voice was not always that of
Piaf, but of Jil Aigrot.
In the end, however, I was convinced that the right artistic decisions
had been taken and that Olivier Dahan had made a film of enormous merit
with Marion Cotillard, utterly compelling in the title role, capturing
Piaf's insecurity and awkwardness as well as the defiant spirit. It
probably won't get beyond the art house circuit in Britain or America.
But what marvellous respite it offers from the French presidential
elections, even if not everyone agrees with me and Gigi is destined to walk out in disgust at the early demise of her beloved Gérard Depardieu.
Labels: Edith Piaf, elections, film, France, Gérard Depardieu, La Mome, Marion Cotillard, Olivier Dahan
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