Disjointed story doesn't disguise lack of storytelling ability

Rating: 1/10 (27 July 2008)

Sometimes, the flashback can be an effective tool. Sometimes a story is best told in pieces rather than a single, linear, contiguous whole.
This movie? Goes to the other extreme. We are whipsawed back and forth all over the main character's life, increasingly as the runtime progresses -- doing little to advance our understanding or sympathy for the character. In fact, it seems specifically concocted to try and make the story more incomprehensible or simply to obscure the fact that the makers of this movie couldn't stand to try and tie together the thread of Edith Piaf's life, preferring to serve up a mishmash of melodramatically tragic vignettes.
In particular, as has been mentioned, I'm not sure that revealing the death of the main character's daughter only near the end accomplishes much, or anything. It's not a "big reveal" or unlocks anything that we've seen all film; it seems cheap that such a particular tragedy would be deliberately hidden until near the end, and then treated as a throwaway reference. But then... characters who aren't Edith Piaf are largely treated as throwaway, popping in and out of disjointed scenes seemingly at random.
There are some who might turn up their nose at linear storytelling because it is somehow too simple to lay out the line of someone's life, and forces you to make sense of the presence of others in that person's life. Using flashbacks, nonlinear disjointed scenes would require *more* skill, not less, to portray facts of the main character's personality more effectively -- a skill that is sadly, even wholly, lacking in this film.