Max McGuinness doesn't regret nothing.
I went to see Olivier Dahan's biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en rose, yesterday. A thoroughly pedestrian affair, it confirms an absurdly maudlin and nostalgic tendency among contemporary French film-makers - La Vie en rose indeed.
Despite a wealth of emotionally inspiring material, Dahan fails to develop an arresting narrative out of Piaf's life. Instead he flits across the major episodes, cutting desperately back and forth across the decades and never dwelling long enough to avoid the impression that he's just trying to cover all the bases - like a kid trying to "explain World War Two" in a 4-page Leaving Cert essay.
Except Dahan, like many of his compatriots, just rubs his chin and looks across the village square when the War does come up.
For, Piaf never regretted belting them out for the Nazis as this clip of the "little sparrow" singing at the height of the round-up of French Jews in 1943 shows:
Like Claude Lelouch's dreadful WWII-set Les Misérables or the ludicrous(and incomprehensible) Audrey Tautou vehicle, A Very Long Engagement, La Vie en rose emphasises the inability of French film-makers to take history seriously. Their default mode is one of sinister sentimentality which obscures their fathers' generally inglorious role in these events.
There are some exceptions - Marcel Ophuls's mammoth documentary about the French Resistance, The Sorrow and the Pity, and Jean-Pierre Melville's meditative Army in the Shadows which, though intended to be an "official" dramatic version of the same events winds up as a moving character study where the résistants are engaged in essentially futile, senseless acts of heroism, abandoned by their countrymen.
Here(Isn't YouTube great?) is a typically chilling excerpt from the latter:
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