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PARIS - A tragic screen portrait of Edith Piaf due out this month is expected to rekindle France's love affair with the tiny chanteuse whose emotive ballads remain among the best-loved songs in French.
The movie La Mome (The Kid), also known internationally as La Vie en Rose from the title of one of her biggest hits, is due for release in France next week and a series of media events will commemorate the singer, who died in 1963.
Piaf's emotional interpretations of songs such as Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, La Vie en Rose and Milord, her expressive eyes and hands and her trademark black dress made her an internationally acclaimed French icon.
From this week, French television and radio will be airing tributes to Piaf, magazines are planning special editions and record companies are releasing a series of compilations to cash in on the wave of nostalgia they hope the film will generate.
La Vie en Rose, directed by Olivier Dahan, will open this year's Berlin Film Festival but Piaf's home country is likely to provide its warmest welcome, given the special place she still holds in the hearts of the nation.
Piaf, born Edith Gassion in 1915 as the daughter of an acrobat and a street singer, grew from a poverty-stricken childhood spent partly in a brothel to become one of France's greatest popular artists.
Renamed "La Mome Piaf" (The Kid Sparrow) by the cabaret owner Louis Leplee, who discovered her singing on a street corner, she was the incarnation of a French tradition of songs mixing sentimentality, humour and gritty realism.
The film taps into an interest in a bygone Paris, but it is the force of Piaf's own story that dominates.
Her life was the stuff of romance and tragedy, with triumphant concerts in Paris and New York and a tumultuous series of affairs, as well as the loss of a child and the death in a plane crash of her lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan.
Marion Cotillard, who plays the singer from age 20 until her death at 47, has already attracted advance rave notices.
- REUTERS
