Word: piaf
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...still-drunk Brazilians, I doddered down to the lobby for a complimentary breakfast and a second rude awakening. My illusions of Paris were quickly shattered during that meal: not only by the stale croissant, but by the horrors of MTV France.I had arrived in the patrie of Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg, and Daft Punk—and in the summer of Justice, no less, the Parisian duo whose “D.A.N.C.E.” was omnipresent in America at the time of my departure. This was the land of baguettes and Bizet, and I, a professed Francophile, was gagging...
...supreme American novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 44, and Nathanael West, 37, died within a day of each other in December 1940. Just a few hours after Edith Piaf died on October 11, 1963, her friend Jean Cocteau passed away as well; some said that France's supreme aesthete did it as the grandest possible gesture of solidarity...
Even on a gray day in Paris last week, there was one place you could find a crowd of tourists from places as varied as Rome, Siberia and Orlando, Fla.--Jim Morrison's grave in Pre-Lachaise cemetery. Forget Frdric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees. The frontman of the Doors has been the cemetery's headline draw ever since the rock star's untimely death in Paris at the age of 27 in July...
...self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story. I guess Dahan thinks it really only has one point - her misery - and that it doesn't make much difference what order he presents it. Cotillard appears to be as tiny as Piaf was (the singer was only 4' 8") and she acts neurasthenic as all get out, but somehow her constantly victimized state works against our sympathetic response, particularly since the film's random structure often robs us of cause-effect connections. Sometime an inner voice threatens to burst forth...
...That pretty much leaves us with Cerdan, radiating good nature and a casual pleasure in his own celebrity, to make us feel good for a few moments, and with Piaf's uncanny voice, still thrilling, still moving in her classic songs. It's easy to make us believe that her sad life conditioned the rueful timbre she imparts to her music. Maybe too easy. It's possible that her natural vocal quality was the one lucky accident in her unlucky life. Which, considering the fame, money and sympathetic regard she collected was not - considered from an objective viewpoint - all that...