Wilted Rose

Rating: 6/10 (8 July 2007)

I have been an Edith Piaf fan for a number of years. I fell in love with her music upon first hearing it and grew and grew in my admiration and love of her talent. I'm not so fanatic, though, as to know every detail of her life and to have read every biography, so I was interested in seeing this film. I even cried a tear or two at the end.
Despite that and the praise it has received, I have some major reservations about it.
First and foremost, the film makes her look like an empty shell, a mannequin who is thrust upon the stage which emits an incredible voice, but the famed vitality of this little woman is never shown. Instead, the image is that of someone who is a shell of a person. I've watched performances and interviews of Piaf up to the year before she died and though she looks like a grandmother by her mid-40's, she is still vital, animated, dynamic and very much alive, not the crippled, bent-over, near-death empty vessel this movie suggests. I have no need to protect the reputation of Edith Piaf. If she was a fall-down drunk and addict, so be it, but this film seems to give what I understand to be a false impression.
Second, perhaps one of the most interesting chapters of her life, that of World War II, is completely omitted. From what I know she worked with the French Resistance. She is known to have helped POW's escape prison camps and I have read that many Resistance fighters owed their lives to her. This movie never told us those stories and that too is a shame. In the film a French soldier is headed off to fight on the front and then suddenly it is 1947!
Finally, the film never really lets Edith Piaf shine. She is portrayed as such an addled wreck of a person and her performances are interspersed nearly like mere footnotes. I'm not sure there is one complete performance at any point. There is no sense she ever achieved greatness. That generations which never knew her (of which I was one), may leave this film never understanding why she was great is the greatest shame. I'm glad my son didn't see it as I think his reaction would have been, "What's the big deal, Dad!"
6/10