Realisateur: Olivier Dahan
Acteurs: Marion Cotillard, Pascal Greggory, Sylvie Testud, Gérard Depardieu,
Jean-Pierre Martins, Marc Barbé, Emmanuelle Seigner
Watched: 24, 25, May, 2 June, 2007
Cinema: GSC 1 Utama, GSC Mid Valley
Colin McGinn, while working on his book, “The Power of Movies”, calls his movie-going habit - “research”. ;-) Excellent perspective to borrow. From 24th May to 3rd June, I was doing a lot of field research indeed. The end of this French movie-watching project found me drunken romancing over 2 new gems, which I’m bringing into my collection of cine-knickknacks. Both have got something to do with musiqué; and its Directeur de la Réalisation & monteur (editor), prove to be very inspiring.
This time, watching "La Môme", sitting in the dark box will be a different experience. For those of you, like me, who simply take that whatever the characters utter is indeed French, will need to transfer some of our audio vigilance to our eyes, so that we can capture the detail-rich scenes, on top of the English translations, plus, processing implications and humor. But it is this inability to predict that makes the anticipation worth its tingle; a constant open patience that would allow the story imprint itself in our mind as the way it is.
‘Raising’ Edith Piaf
When your goal is to tell a person’s life story, the plot will be simple – she was born, she lived, eventually she dies. The opening sequence makes this very clear right from the start: A heavily made-up lady in a black suit stands singing on a stage. Her lungs throw out streams of sonorous chant, sending her audience out of reality’s door, into an unseen realm of heavenly reverbs. Meanwhile, a stretcher was brought out of an ambulance parked at the back alley of the concert hall. The man ushering the medics through the stage passage briefs them, in his urgency, that our singer on stage had a fainting fit 10 minutes before they arrived. They watch from the side, her face strains as she pulls off the finalé with a booming refrain. “Heaven have Mercy, Heaven have Mercy, Heaven have Mer-“ Her body falls back on the floor. A sheet of black consumes her vision… All she could do now, is to pray…Almost immediately we know where the story would be going. It’s set in the music industry, it’s glorious, and like it or not, it’s going to be tragic.
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A film like this essentially demands the filmmakers to explore at length, what made Edith the person she was. This film, titled after her stage name, “La Môme Piaf”, attempts to track Edith from her childhood, through to her old age; speculating for us the deterministic moments that eventually brought Edith to her glory and fall while she lived.Though the story rides on a time-crossing editing style, we could observe very clearly whether a scene describes a 5, a 10, 20, or 40-year old Edith. And the film takes an approach that subtly denotes transformation in Edith’s growth in personality and identity:
Childhood
In this part of her life, the audience is put on a tour, so to speak, taken right into her family and her social circle. At age 5, her father, upon release from the French army, snatched Edith off her drunken, street singer mother and brought her to live with the grandmother. Her grandmother managed and lived in a prostitute house, where constant erotica runs wild, possessing real men and women in display of sensuous, playful toying, giggles, fondles and such. Of course, when the men left together with their un-shameful groans and whimpers, she also got to make friends with and witnessed what became of the women – unforgiving self-batter, cursing their own self-betrayal to insanity, if not death.During her time in the prostitute house, she contracted conjunctivitis and went blind. Little did she know that she would soon receive her only faithful friend and helper she could spiritually rely on for the rest of her life – Saint Theresa. A few sisters at the brothel brought her to pray to Saint Theresa, and her eyes miraculously healed.
As we observe little Edith, we realise that we’re really being shown how people around her treated her, and the lifestyles they demonstrated to her. We’re led to understand the environment that was dictated upon her. In those scenes above, she had very little to say, nor any chance to publicly express her views, only to accept, and react to anything that was smacked at her. It’s as if the filmmakers are trying to say that she had no choice, but to take in for herself what she saw other people were doing.
After a certain time, her father came back, and took her to join him in the traveling circus he worked with as a contortionist. The moment came for her to discover her gift of singing, when her father left the circus, and began throwing off solo acts on Belleville streets. On a particular show, the watching crowd requested, or rather, insisted that the young girl perform. Unsure if she was terrified or spurred, the moment came for her to open her mouth. She sent out a resounding song that raised eyebrows, sounded applauses and moved hands to give.
Once the curtain’s pulled up for Edith, the rest of the story saw her self-assertion pops up, as from a toaster. It feels like a psychological marking, where the film says: Now, Edith grows up…
• • • • •
Youth
Very quickly, we’re brought into the busy streets, within ever-flowing streams of shuffling pedestrians. Two giggling girls came to the foot of a flight of stairs; they started running, racing each other up to the top; approaching ‘us’ from the front.
I’m thinking, this scene is cleverly used, indirectly but tangibly, to bring out the notion of Edith increasing in age and energy. We eventually discover that after coming out of her father’s care she developed a close friendship with Simone (or Mômone), with whom she sprinkled the streets with singing, diffusing her spellbinding vocal trinkets along their trails.
In the context of this film, this is the period when Edith begins to feel that her existence matters to the world. Playing on the one craft she knows best, people who could hear her and could afford, gave her their minute or two, and their coins. These unfamiliar faces upon hearing her sing, would pause from their own itinerary, and admiringly mesmer in a dream staged in their own ears. Those coins Edith received in her early years, not only paid for her meals, more importantly, they told her something that her parents; her grandparents couldn’t tell her – that she is appreciated.
Her affair with the audience began innocently flirtatious, only to gain momentum, and escalated in numbers and passion together with the growth of her career. Her break came, literally just ‘around the corner’. On a curb marking the start of a diverging road, she did not know that she would stand in between Louis M. Leplée and his home. Who would have known this stroll of strolls, could set once sorrow to rise on the wings of sparrow?
Leplée brought “La Môme Piaf ” – The Sparrow Kid, to high society.
• • • • •
When Leplée died, despite her astounding voice, Edith went on a series of painfully unlearning and relearning new platform cultures, before her mentor Raymond Asso could book her into her first show up at musical hall – the mark of a real Artist in their time. This would be one of the dearest scenes in the film –
Pacified from her paralyzing stage fright, Edith comes on stage, under the scrutiny of the overly bright spot light, though, through the beam she wasn’t blinded to the many who wait, but impatient.
It’s like attending a blind date, where both sides try to size up the other, yet without crushing him/her with too much prejudice.
Edith opens her mouth in her audience’s anticipating gaze.
No sound! But the orchestral film score continues streaming.
Together with the daunting score in the minor key, unsmiling eyes attended to Edith with caution. Edith closes in.
The more she engages in her song, the more it pulls her into a life of its own, coming out in all its drama as she throws a humourous sneer or raised an indifferent shoulder.
Lip-lines began to soften into an arch, necks losing their stiffness.
Only in a graceful turn of tone, the score ascending towards a choral spirit lifts with the audience’s responsive laughter, unaware of their lack of composure…
They like it. They like Edith Piaf.
• • • • •
Adulthood
It will come clear for us, once we consult the adventure-abundant biography of the real life legendary French singer, that this film has adopted emphases and omissions that are quite unique.
A recurring theme is of merciless separation and the mirroring desperation to fill that tear. Abandoned by her mother, she thought she found home in the brothel where sisters surrounded her. The panic shrieks alone will never explain how painful when her best friend was pulled away from her. Titine, last saw her drifting farther and farther away, riding on her father’s horse cart. After Louis M. Leplée, whom cared for her like a parent, was murdered, the authority also forcefully took her buddy Simone away. The separation that began the fall of her life came in deep horror for her, when she heard that the man she loved, crashed to pieces with the airplane that was bringing him to see her.
With that background, director Olivier has chosen to give us the Edith who is “feisty, impetuous, egotistical, self-destructive, downright infuriating at times”(1). After the devastating death of the love of her life, Marcel Cerdan, her body became a deposit of serious amount of alcohol, morphine and the casual musk of many men. On top of a rib-breaking car crash, arthritis turned her already frail body into an ashy, hunchback, shivering senile woman, looking 60 although she was only 47 when she died.
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Directorial Lessons
Any review essay for “La Môme” will surely make comments on its generous time-jumping cuts. And I believe it’s one of the rare films where time-jump works. To illustrate why it works, this is a linguistic version of it:
“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy,
it deosn’tmttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the
rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can
sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef,
but the wrod as a wlohe.”(2, p.27)
Michael Guillen attended the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF-50) and interviewed director Olivier Dahan. Michael commented:
… The film was seen through "shards shed from the spotty memory of an ailing drug addict", as Dave Hudson pointed out at The Greencine Daily. As a director, these drugged fugue states served Dahan's thematic and creative aims by allowing him the freedom to shift the story away from factual realities. He didn't want to make a biopic in the first place; he wanted to paint a portrait. He might have felt obligated to the facts but the facts were not the reason behind his film… he wanted his audience to relax into the film and to feel it, not think it. (3)
Many criticized the film’s time jumps, giving us a child in one scene and then flies across decades in the next. On first reception, the cuts felt to me like random picks of chapters from a book. Though many were gracefully transitioned, it still requires some effort to follow. But as I viewed it the second, and third time, I’m convinced that there’s a motif in laying the story in this seemingly jarring sequence.
For one, it prevents movie veterans from actively preoccupying themselves in critiquing the film even before they finish viewing it. Abrupt changes to the path of the story discourage comments we say in our heads based on our predictions, whether consciously or unconsciously. Which means, like it or not, as audience, you are not in control of the flow; you will be subjected to surprises in the unfolding process.
And as I mentioned in the earlier part of this review, the plot is made very clear right at the beginning of the story. The time jump puts child-Edith and old-Edith into juxtaposition, providing us a big picture already at the start. And it is this very knowledge that poses the challenge for Olivier. Could we audience still be entertained, informed, gripped and led into the story despite seeing the overview? This challenge is even more valid with French audience who knows their national icon well, or at least through her biography.
So, given the uncertainty of time and setting, the audience can only ‘attach’ themselves to the only one that is constantly present in the scenes – Edith Piaf. Which achieves exactly what Olivier wants; a portrait that pushes aside other things that could distract us from the person.
A word on acting. Marion Cotillard’s heart felt personification of Edith Piaf, left me feeling both emotionally drained and rewarding at the end, and regret only that I couldn’t stand in ovation as the credits rolled. What more could I say about the film except for the incredible cohesiveness of plot, drama, performance, scores, transitions etc; one that requires an editing with both consistency and ability to accommodate dynamics. A brilliant masterpiece.
image credit- - - - - § - - - - -
1) Dave Hudson, (2007) Greencine Daily. Berlinale Dispatch: La Mome. Taken from
http://daily.greencine.com/archives/003231.html
2) Michael Dean, (2004). $30 Writing School. Boston, MA, USA: Course Technology
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/mybc/Doc?id=10065747&ppg=47
3) Michael Guillen, (2007). La Vie en Rose: The Evening Class Interview with Olivier Dahan. Taken from http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/06/la-vie-en-rose-evening-class-interview.html
http://daily.greencine.com/archives/003231.html
2) Michael Dean, (2004). $30 Writing School. Boston, MA, USA: Course Technology
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/mybc/Doc?id=10065747&ppg=47
3) Michael Guillen, (2007). La Vie en Rose: The Evening Class Interview with Olivier Dahan. Taken from http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/06/la-vie-en-rose-evening-class-interview.html
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Sharon Chong, Published 11th June, 2007
GSC, 1 utama
:o)
Sharon Chong, Published 11th June, 2007
GSC, 1 utama
:o)
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