Remember your Audience!

Rating: Null/10 (30 September 2007)

That's by way of a plea to movie makers. Edith Piaf was around still when I was a child and I'm well into middle age now, but her career was just about over even then. That means that most of the people who have heard of her, or at least who care about her and her music, are at least my age. And mostly older. (Of course I guess that's not true in France, and in fairness this is a French movie. Maybe I'm being too Anglocentric here?) But the night I saw this movie in my local theatre, I'm fairly sure I was one of the youngest people there. And all around me people were whispering tell tale comments like "What's going on?", "Who is that?", "Where did he come from?", "Is that the guy we saw just now?" etc etc. In other words, they were confused and they were not the type of audience who were used to watching movies that skip all over the place in time zones. Even I was confused, and I take my Gingko Biloba every day without fail.
The movie has some good performances, and of course the backbone is the great singing of Piaf herself, but the story telling method is way too complicated, with at least three time lines going on. I think this distracts from what could have been an interesting insight into what made Piaf tick. She was certainly not a very touchy-feely human being, and she had a pretty bleak start in life, but I do think she had an extraordinary voice. The best part of this movie by far (as in most coherent) was the central core story of Piaf's love affair with a boxer, when she was truly at her happiest. Perhaps the coherency of the story telling here is supposed to convey that this was indeed the most coherent part of Piaf's life? He is killed in an accident, and after that her life pretty much descends into a drug riddled mess made worse by the death of her only child and her own poor health, and comparisons to later divas are too obvious to even mention. Marion Cotillard gives a good physical performance as Piaf (the singing is all Piaf originals), I found her very convincing. I've certainly seen far worse movies but that's damning it with faint praise. It could have been so much better with a more linear story.