"Edith and Marcel" for the MTV generation.

Rating: 4/10 (9 March 2007)

A few years ago, Claude Lelouch already tried to capture the essence of Edith Piaf's tremendous life with his movie, "Edith et Marcel", focusing his point of view on the love affair she had with Marcel Cerdan (and also on another love affair, merely links by hazard and coincidence to the first one...). It was rather bad, and despite a good use of Piaf's music (especialy "La Foule") and a moving interpretation of Jacques Villeret (who doesn't play Marcel Cerdan, be reassured), you didn't really see the passion of Piaf on screen. And the problem with "La Môme" is that, if you have the impression to learn much more about Piaf and to be directly link to her mind and subjectivity thanks to a cross-timing editing, the movie doesn't really ask the one and only question that a movie about an artist shall ask : what links the suffering and the life we're watching to the specificity of the art it creates ?
This absence of an artistic point of view creates a rather confusing movie, where fragments of Piaf's life seems to have been randomly chosen by the emotional impact they can produce on the spectator. And all you've learn after more than 2 hours and 30 minutes of this movie, is that Piaf suffered a lot in her life and sang great songs... There's really no need to rush in theaters to learn that. Of course, the emotional impact of the movie is higher than its educational purposes. But if you really think of it, it's only artificially created by the songs of Piaf, and culminates in her last Olympia, where she sings "Je ne regrette rien". And if this scene is indeed touching and emotionally though, that has nothing to do with the inner qualities of the movie, but everything to do with its music.
What Olivier Dahan brings to this Biographie is only a Video Clip's style, photography and editing, which only hides the emptiness of his vision by a rather childish direction. See for instance the announcement of Cerdan's death, and how artificially Dahan copies the first scene of "Edith et Marcel", only with a useless fantastic tone in addition. See how the movie takes the same video clip's clichés of "Le petit Poucet", whereas the movie tries to be realistic and serious... And, in my opinion, the acclaim acting of Marion Cotillard participates to that need to impress and to artificially creates emotions, instead of making a good and intelligent movie. It's true that she's truly amazing as Piaf, but she tries so hard to be her, that I only saw an actress, with a lot of make-up, trying to act like Piaf. It's more a representation than an incarnation. But I have to admit that the make-up was quite impressive and played really well.
All this shining reconstitution can impress you for a while, but there's also a big chance that you get bored by so much artificiality and superficiality and so little artistic point of view rather rapidly.