Word: piaf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...These reflections are occasioned by the arrival from France of La Vie En Rose, a biopic about the gifted, fragile and intermittently insane chanteuse Edith Piaf. Writer-director Olivier Dahan, has given her story a sumptuous production - with the look of an old-fashioned Hollywood musical sob story - as well as a maddeningly fragmented structure. For reasons best known to Dahan, he is always cutting from Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) at the height of her relatively brief life (she was discovered in 1935 and died, at age 47, in 1963) to this or that aspect of her dismal past...
...always tempting to define most French musicians by where they fit on the Chanson Française spectrum, that openly defined yet traditional Gallic brand of dramatic songcraft made famous by singers like Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf decades ago. Is a band's m.o. to perform "chanson" with an ironic rock twist? Is that chanteuse doing classic chanson writ modern? It seems that French musicians can't just simply be musicians. But Keren Ann can, and she's not even French...
Auguste Renoir painted them, Edith Piaf saAuguste Renoir painted them, Edith Piaf sang about them and, most recently, Am?lie did her shopping on them. But icon of Paris though the centuries-old cobblestones of Montmartre may be, they are being removed as part of a council project aimed at turn this historic quarter of Paris into the city's largest "Green Village." To make way for wider sidewalks, cycle lanes and new scooter parks, diggers have torn up chunks of some of Montmartre's most famous thoroughfares, unsentimentally replacing them with uniform layers of tarmac...
...Piaf had oceans of talent to back up the hype, earning her a global following. Since 1997, her greatest hits album has sold over 4 million copies, half of them outside France. "That's a kind of international recognition that today's French-language artists just don't achieve," says Cécile Prévost-Thomas, a sociologist specializing in French song. Piaf's success abroad reminds the country of a time when its cultural exports could achieve popularity while remaining defiantly French. The passing of that era is lamented amid the proliferation of American Idol?style reality shows...
Perhaps it is no surprise that the French would long for Piaf's groundedness at a time when their country feels its own ground shifting. Her humble authenticity amounts to a kind of safe haven from the obliterating force of a louder and crasser world culture. No wonder anxious French citizens are flocking into the outstretched arms of Paris' favorite daughter...