Piaf: mômentous moineau

Even someone with my minority tastes in music can see that a failure to be moved by Edith Piaf should be treated as evidence of a heart of stone.

Picture: idealterna

La Môme, a sketchy but endearing film of her life, has been out for a couple of weeks in France and is doing great business.

A first attempt to see it, in the cinematic backwater of La Londes-les-Maures, ended in disappointment. If we were among no more than five customers watching Mel Gibson's Apocalypto a month earlier, we couldn't get anywhere a seat for La Môme despite arriving half an hour before it started.

So to neighbouring Hyères yesterday.

Bookings by phone or internet are not allowed and it's a pain to drive all the way there and back without being sure, so we took the sad senior citizen option and turned up in good time for the 4.45pm screening at the Olbia.

A man some way to my right snored gently, and I couldn't help noticing that a young woman, who arrived in a short skirt and sat nearby, left at the end wearing jeans.

But whatever drove him to his slumber, and her to seize an opportunity to change, I was hooked from the opening sequence showing Piaf as a grubby Parisian street urchin.

The plot darted this way and that through a life of glorious tragedy, her downfall predetermined by lifelong attachment to the bottle and eventually addiction to drugs.

La Vie En Rose
Picture: lichtundschatten

I am sure it must barely have scraped at the surface, and the zig-zagging chronology was liable to induce dizziness.

For the purposes of the soundtrack, the voice was not always that of Piaf, but of Jil Aigrot.

In the end, however, I was convinced that the right artistic decisions had been taken and that Olivier Dahan had made a film of enormous merit with Marion Cotillard, utterly compelling in the title role, capturing Piaf's insecurity and awkwardness as well as the defiant spirit.

It probably won't get beyond the art house circuit in Britain or America. But what marvellous respite it offers from the French presidential elections, even if not everyone agrees with me and Gigi is destined to walk out in disgust at the early demise of her beloved Gérard Depardieu.

Taking leave of critical senses

Lovers of French cinema come clean, and to my rescue.

Picture: Daryl Van Horne.

Who hasn't quite enjoyed a film in the language of Molière while thinking that if this were in English, it would be dismissed as pornography or trash, or both?

Gérard Depardieu, not to everyone's taste though I find him a likeable mixture of vulgarity and rough-diamond charm, has been in at least a couple of movies fitting one or other description. So has Béatrice Dalle.

The thought occurred as I was smarting from a friend's reaction of utter horror at my admission that I had quite enjoyed The Holiday, the lightweight story of two women - played by Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz - who swap homes on either side of the Atlantic for a fortnight.

Not even a defensive aside - "I know it's fluffy but watching it in French I really liked it (even if I haven't much time for Diaz or Jude Law" - did me any good. As far as my friend was concerned, I might as well have told her I had decided that line dancing was cool.

Back came the reply: "I can't believe you liked it. I thought it was terrible....."

Terrible, and just to rub it in, "apart, of course, from Jude Law who looked absolutely divine".

I have not read any reviews in what the French like to call the Anglo-Saxon press, and almost certainly won't now, so have no idea if anyone, anywhere, watching in English, came away smiling.

Perhaps someone can come up with an even more distressing example of a film that grew in stature, or seemed to, just because of the language.

There is no similar excuse for having also enjoyed Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, since everyone sees it with subtitles from the Mayan dialect.

But at least here I am in authoritative company. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who must know what he's talking about since he is my elder daughter's favourite critic and she works in film, overcame real personal resistance to give it a four-star review.

"If people have got it in for Mel Gibson," he wrote, "he has only himself to blame. His behaviour has been repulsive. Everyone is prejudiced against his films. I am prejudiced against his films. So the sentence following this is going to take me quite some time to write, because between every keystroke, there will be a three-minute pause while I clench my fists up to my temples and emit a long growl of resentment and rage.
"Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is pathologically brilliant. It is bizarre, stomach-turningly violent and frequently inspired."

The Graun's recommendations, sadly, appear to carry little weight in these parts.

The version we saw, with French subtitles, proved no Sunday afternoon draw at Le Forum, a cinema tucked away in a small shopping centre just along the coast at La Londes-les-Maures.

The man who took our money - only five euros each - also acted as usher and projectionist. He'd have served the ice creams and popcorns, too, had there been any.

As we entered the surprisingly large salle, he detected our surprise at the row after row of empty seats. "Oui," he said with resignation, "vous êtes quatre."

A little pessimistically, he'd reckoned without a late rush. By the time the film started (only a few moments later since Le Forum doesn't mess about with trailers and ads), we had grown to five.

The socialist guru among Sarko's new best friends

French socialists were choking on their coffee and croissants this morning as they took in the small print of Nicolas Sarkozy's speech at the Porte de Versailles shindig launching him as the centre-Right presidential candidate.

Image: lfone.

If the trouble with French streets is that too many of them are named after Jean Jaurès, as a character remarked in the 1970s Gérard Depardieu film Maitresse, the trouble with Jaurès is that his admirers now apparently include Sarko.

François Hollande, general secretary of the Parti Socialiste and the father of Ségolène Royal's children, thinks the old lefty must be rattling round in the grave to which an assassin consigned him on the eve of France's entry into the First World War.

Hollande did not need to complete his own indignant riposte: "Pauvres Jaurès! If only he had known that one day his name would be cited at a conference of the French Right......."

I dread to think what some of those Right-wing tubthumpers who champion Sarko so enthusiatically would make of his soft spot for Jaurès.

This, after all, was the man who helped create the party of Hollande and Ségo, founded what became France's Communist paper L'Humanité and opposed the Great War (it was his pacifistic objections to the conflict that got him killed).

But let us not forget Margaret Thatcher on the steps of 10 Downing Street, marking her arrival as Prime Minister by adopting the words of St Francis of Assisi.

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony," she declared. "Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope."

Others were to assess quite harshly how much harmony, truth, faith and hope Maggie and her ministers brought, for example, to east Durham and South Wales.

Hollande may regard Sarko as having misappropriated the heritage of a French socialist hero. The Left-of-centre Libération took a slightly kinder view.

"Can a man who invokes Jaurès, Hugo, Mandel and Zola be wholly bad?" the paper asked. "Can a man who wants an irreproachable democracy be accused of rampant Le Pen-ism? Is a man who talks at length about the rights of the badly housed and the welfare of others be described as ultra-liberal?"

While conceding that there was much of the "well-known Sarkozy cynicism" in all this, the Libé editorialist was gracious enough to conclude that for all that could be said to Sarko's detriment, he had produced an impressive performance.

Over to you Ségo.