The real Edith Piaf and "La Vie en Rose'

Where were you during the war?
Edith Piaf's Gunter Grass moment

DAN ROTTENBERG

The frail French torch singer Édith Piaf (1915-1963) was a figure of immense personal suffering and equally immense inner strength whose persistence in the face of repeated tragedy transformed her into a national icon. La Vie en Rose, the new film by Olivier Dahan, movingly captures Piaf’s traumas: her abandonment by her parents, her childhood in a brothel, her four years of blindness and six years of deafness, the death of her only child, the murder of her mentor, the death in a plane crash of the love of her life (the boxer Marcel Cerdan), her addiction to morphine and alcohol, three near-fatal auto accidents, and finally her death from liver cancer, all of which she seemingly confronted with the spunk expressed in her last signature song, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (“I regret nothing”).

The film is a relentlessly harrowing experience, with a remarkable performance by Marion Cotillard in the title role. Only when you emerge from the darkened theater into the real world of the street does the question occur:

Piaf became a French national icon because her life seemed to embody the sufferings and persistence of her countrymen. Yet for any European of Piaf’s generation— and certainly any French man or woman— the central, ineradicable tragedy was World War II. In 1940, as German panzer tanks rumbled through the Ardennes forest, the French faced a choice: The nation that gave birth to the rights of man could resist the ultimate enemy of those rights, or it could supinely sue for peace. France's government chose the latter, to the regret and disgrace of its people ever since. Yet for all its many flashbacks and flash-forwards, La Vie En Rose neglects to mention World War II once.

Günter Grass’s test, and Irène Némirovsky’s

Most of Piaf’s European contemporaries whose lives weren’t destroyed by the war saw their careers made or broken by it. The German writer Günter Grass, in The Tin Drum and many other works, positioned himself for 60 years as postwar Germany’s conscience, repeatedly denouncing his fellow Germans’ failure to confront their Nazi past. His recent revelation (in his autobiographical work, Peeling the Onion) that as a teenager he had served briefly in the Nazis’ dreaded Waffen SS extermination corps was properly greeted with outrage and astonishment— not that Grass (like so many other young Germans) had been sucked into the Nazi machine, but that he had spent 60 years casting stones at so many others without acknowledging his own guilt.

The budding career of the French novelist Irène Némirovsky was silenced when she was shipped off to a German concentration camp to die, but then it was resuscitated last year when the manuscript of her novel about France under the occupation was discovered and published as Suite Française.

And sometimes I think about Denis Fabian, a Czech cousin of mine born in 1912, who worked his way through college and law school in the hope of bettering his station in life, only to see his status reduced after the war to a displaced person forced to start all over again in the U.S. (I felt Denis should be grateful he survived, but his bitterness accompanied him to the grave.)

But La Vie en Rose would have us believe that World War II was irrelevant to Edith Piaf or her career. She sang before the war; she sang during it; she sang afterward. A moviegoer can’t help wondering: Was Piaf’s life so traumatic to begin with that the Nazi occupation didn’t even register on her emotional Richter scale? And if that was the case, why did the French embrace her?

Collaborator or Resistance heroine?

Let the record show: The failure here was not Piaf’s, but the filmmaker’s. Piaf grappled uncertainly with the German occupation just like everyone else. Upon the fall of France in 1940 Piaf was 25 and had been singing in nightclubs for five years. During the occupation she and her half-sister lived above a brothel frequented by German soldiers. She sang for high-ranking Germans and consequently was accused of being too friendly with the Germans and perhaps collaborating with them. But her songs earned her the right to pose for photos with French prisoners of war— allegedly to boost their morale, but actually to enable them to snip out their photos for use in forged passports after they escaped. She co-wrote a subtle protest song during the occupation and dated a Jewish pianist. Her association with the French resistance later became well known, and many former Resistance members are said to owe their lives to her.

Yes, Piaf became a national icon because her art reflected the immense sorrows of her life. But that alone wasn’t sufficient reason for the French to embrace her. The real reason was that, whatever her weaknesses and faults, at a critical moment in the life of her country, she rose to the occasion. She made the right choice when her country’s ruling politicians and generals made the wrong one.

That, I would submit, is the ultimate test for each of us— not how you respond to poverty or illness or mistreatment or a broken heart (although, to be sure, these are important tests, too), but how you respond when your larger community is threatened by evil. That’s why war remains such an endless subject of fascination for novelists and filmmakers. It’s the missing piece— the vital context— without which La Vie en Rose fails as a work of art or biography.



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