Voice that enchanted postwar Paris reaches a new generation
Edith Piaf's life is chronicled in a film released last month – France's answer to the Hollywood biopic.
from the March 6, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Even today, the street-waif turned diva continues to inhabit a world apart in France. Pop music now exists as a series of subcategories, whether hip-hop or country, rock or jazz. But Piaf managed to transcend age and social class in creating an urban French sound."We are always trying to compare [Piaf] to singers today. But the fact that we can't find anyone is a tribute to Piaf's special status," says David Lelait-Helo, one of her biographers. "If we are still talking about her 45 years later, that's proof of her standing."
Piaf's persona might be akin to Billie Holliday, Judy Garland, and Janis Joplin rolled into one. When she first came to New York in 1947, she nearly took a U-turn back to France. Postwar American audiences didn't "get" her.
Only a supportive column by the venerable music critic Virgil Thomson of the New York Herald gave her the courage to stay. Piaf returned eight times, touring everywhere and hanging out in Beverly Hills with Ginger Rogers.
In Paris, Piaf started in Belleville, the low-rent outskirts of Paris, where there's now a statue at Edith Piaf Square. She sang on the street, a popular Parisian art form at a time when radios were a luxury. She sang in the "comedy" style of Maurice Chevalier – vaudevillian songs of absurdity and fun. Yet cabaret owner Louis Leplée, played in the film by Gerard Depardieu, helps her adopt the other French style: realism. This music catches the sad, longing mood of Paris in the post-World War 1 "belle epoch" period, and Piaf made it her own. "It was truer, deeper, in a sadder context of nostalgia, a kind of French blues that got Piaf taken seriously," says musicologist François Levy, who wrote text for a Piaf exhibition in 2004.
She moved from street bars to cafes to cabarets, and up to music halls. In occupied Paris, Piaf played cabarets whose light came from generators run by stationary bicycles. After the war, impresarios fought over her, since Piaf always sold out. She kept one hall, the Olympia, in business for years.
That musical world faded by the late 1970s. But Piaf has not.
In Paris, the film has been closely scrutinized. How do you portray a national icon whose life has been shredded into myth by friends, husbands, and hangers-on? Reviews run from vacuous five-star admiration to tough two-star dismissal.
Mr. Dahan's attempt at fast-paced flashbacks of Piaf's life make the film difficult to follow, critics say. But Ms. Cotillard's performance is unique.
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