A film that makes me count my blessings

There have been quite a few films made in recent years about singers and musicians’ lives. We have had films about the late Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, to name just two. The latest of this type is the biopic of the French singer, Edith Piaf. Even if the film exaggerates a bit for effect, she led an extraordinary and in certain ways very sad life. Edith Piaf, was probably the most famous French person in the middle of the 20th Century apart from Charles de Gaulle or Maurice Chevalier.

There are lots of good things in the film, starting with the performance of Marion Cotillard, who is uncannily good in the lead role and it has plenty of strong supporting performances including a short but strong set of scenes with Gerard Depardieu, who plays the nightclub owner who discovers young Edith singing for cash in the streets of Paris. The scenery is nicely handled; we are given an idea of what early 20th Century France was like for people born on the wrong side of the tracks (at one stage, young Edith was raised in a brothel). She was born during the First World War and lived in Paris during the Second, and according to this Wikipedia entry, helped with the French Resistance. What is interesting, however, is that almost no reference whatever is made to WW2 and occupied France in the film, as if the subject matter is either too sensitive for the supposed audience – the movie is made in French, with subtitles – or some other reason. And yet the way in which such artists managed to survive and even forge some sort of a career during wartime is surely an interesting subject.

To say that she was unlucky in love was an understatement; she was also a serious addict of painkiller drugs and other substances and died of liver cancer in her mid-40s, but the film does not make her into some sort of whining, pathetic victim although it does at times slip into a tragic sense of life – to use Ayn Rand’s expression – which becomes a little oppressive at times. On the whole, however, it is quite clear that she made certain choices in her life and benefited and suffered accordingly. I certainly left the cinema with a greater understanding of why this little, charismatic woman from the streets of Paris rose to become one of the greatest singers of all time. Here’s to her memory.