No, Too Many Regrets

Well, after my year away, I am finally back to web work tomorrow, and I can't say I am relishing the idea. Still though my travels may be curtailed, I fully intend to keep writing, reviewing and unwisely making my thoughts public, so the blog will go on, though I will have to change the title. Anyway for the days of travel now behind me I am eternally grateful to the Fates, and I also thank those of you who followed me. Please keep reading, commenting and keeping in touch. I am still here, still here....

While I think about it, I went to 'La Vie en Rose' last Friday. I might have been the only male in the audience (except for an idiot exhibitionist who stood up in front of the credits to kiss his girlfriend; there are rooms for that sort of thing). Definitely a chick flick.

I was a little disappointed though. It certainly holds the attention and, although I think the praise for Marion Cotillard is a little too extravagant, her performance as Edith Piaf anchors the movie well. Its hopscotch approach to her life though, jumping from her childhood to her old age and then to her twenties etc., doesn't really help matters. Her love affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan, though dealt with at some length (comparatively speaking), somehow comes too late and in too patchwork a manner to really grip us as the life-changing event we are meant to believe it to be. That Piaf had a child who died at the age of 2 is almost thrown in as an afterthought towards the end. These kind of events surely deserve more attention. Instead we get a lot of inconsequential meetings (a banal interview on a beach) or bare moments shorn of their full context (Daddy Leplee's murder). I for one wanted to know more of Piaf in the war years (her involvement with the Resistance, for instance), but this era of her life scarcely gets a mention. A brief glance at the Wikipedia entry on Piaf shows that there was a lot left out and I can't help feeling there is a better movie on Piaf yet to be made (actually there is already a movie on her love affair with Cerdan called 'Edith et Marcel').