The film is a betrayal of the Lady

Rating: 6/10 (4 November 2008)

This film had an enormous success when it came out and it was the winner of quite a few awards, Oscars and Caesars. But the DVD is already on sale, and at a dramatic low price. The film was well made, rich indeed and the actress did a fabulous composition to fit with her part, because it was only a part that was dictated by the author and director. All the nostalgic liked it for a short while because it was some music from a distant past but so few of Piaf's songs were actually performed, and in their entirety, that the film lost its nostalgic appeal very fast. But the worse was still to come because the composite portrait painted on this screen has little to do with the real woman. So many things are absent. Her deep connections with Jews during the war for one, and after the war for two, with her famous Exodus song. And the extremely devout Catholic mirage projected onto that woman is absurd, to the point of ignoring her last husband nearly totally, since he was a Greek Orthodox. The woman is betrayed into a neurotic even psychotic capricious clown that kills herself with morphine and other drugs, willfully and consciously out of foolishness, love seen as a derangement, and plain suicidal conduct. She wasn't that. She was warm, loving, extremely attentive to others and many other qualities that are ignored and even rejected so that she appears as a crazy Catholic that is attached, in the most derogative Buddhist meaning, to a cross and a Saint and Jesus. I was asked recently to produce a note on her "Jewishness" and I was embarrassed because in spite of all the links she had with Jews and Judaism and Israel, it is difficult to find in her life a real testimony about her religion, especially with her last marriage being in the Orthodox faith. And I think that this bigotry of the film explains why it is already nearly given away to anyone who wants to grab it. I personally feel betrayed by this film because I lived that period in a completely different light with widely accepted maybe untruths but magical and mythical stories about this great lady that has inspired so many other artists.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines