Fitzcarraldo

At almost precisely the halfway point of this film, the crew of the Molly Aida espies a small black object floating down the Pachitea (an Amazon tributary) towards their large white vessel. It is revealed to be an umbrella, the only remnant of an extremely ill–fated mission to the Jivaros tribe, and, one would think, a logical appurtenance to take into a rain forest. The first mate of the ship, knowing the ways of these "bare-asses" (as they are referred to the entire film), selects for his carry-on luggage a much more appropriate invention from that most civilized of Europeans. Perhaps because he understands that, ultimately, mother nature will be the least of the expedition's obstacles.
 

Although the titular character (Klaus Kinski) insists that his name is a lazy indigenization of "Fitzgerald," the story is remotely based on that of a real rubber baron, a ship, waves of overtaxed natives, and a mountain (even Cortés himself is said to have tried such a stunt). His predecessor had the good sense, however, to dismantle the craft before obliging the local tribesmen to do his dirty work. But Fitzcarraldo has no such sense, nor is he really a rubber baron at heart. His passion is and always will be opera, specifically Verdi and more specifically Caruso (whom he travels hours to hear in the opening scene). By becoming rich off the last unclaimed rubber parcel in the region, Fitzcarraldo hopes to build an opera house that will attract the greatest voices from around the world. Yet there are, one might imagine, some very good reasons why that parcel has remained unclaimed. One reason are the Jivaros, plague-ridden for over a decade and insular since the dawn of time. We are told with the opening credits that they await the advent of an alleged messiah, a "great white God." A second is the parcel's location, between two rivers and rapids such as those that actually swallowed up Fitzcarraldo's namesake. The only way around is, well, over a mountain.
 
The allegorical Ahabian elements are certainly present, Herzog does recycle some stock characters (the brooding and mysterious first mate, the drunk and carefree cook, the captain constantly warning Fitzcarraldo of his impetuous folly), and the Molly Aida (Molly is Mrs. Fitzgerald, and thankfully for her, not along for the ride) is a "great white vessel," a bit bigger than a whale, but still comparable. Yet for all his monomania, Fitzcarraldo's quest is the benevolent pursuit of an aesthete. The only things whiter than his ship and his suit are his teeth. When the cook, who is also the interpreter, tells him that, "they know we are not gods," Fitzcarraldo is more worried about his opera house than his own stature. His hubris has a good end in mind, and maybe that will entice the gods to spare him the disasterous fate that should rightly befall such a ridiculous venture.  
 
Much has been made of the difficulty of filming Fitzcarraldo, and, like it or not, both Herzog and Kinski are shackled together in eternal infamy for their parts. That the two Germans overcame their differences and the easy critique of colonialism to make it into, at times, an amazing artistic achievement, speaks volumes about the film's vision, inevitably ratcheted down into the movie poster of Fitzcarraldo pointing at the ship as it heads uphill. But scenes such as the natives' first contact with ice (for which, the cook says, they have no word) really make the film: after holding then sniffing this fantastic object for a while, the puzzled chieftain turns to his people triumphantly. He is on a deck three stories above them and that much closer to these gifts from heaven.    

Downfall

Happy families, begins a famous Russian novel, are all alike in their felicity; unhappy families, however, are all unhappy in their own way. The sad nonsense of such a generalization notwithstanding, one notices a grain of truth: we are fascinated by what is not right probably because most of the world is more or less right, and good and evil prove to be no exceptions. Throughout man's history what has been deemed good has simultaneously been deemed boring – much sadder nonsense than Tolstoy's gimmicky opening – because it is always difficult to live among people who are your superiors in piety, righteousness, or goodness. No one, you will hear ironically, wants to marry a saint. For that reason as well as from our inherent attraction to people and ideas which seem to offer us radical change, freedom, and a break from the commonness of the everyday, we tend to trust rebels, firebrands, and revolutionaries. True enough, they are often exciting and charming demagogues who will lie without compunction until they gain what they want. Yet what is remarkable about evil and the despots who espouse it is their uniformity. They all want absolute trust, absolute power, absolute obedience, absolute credit, and no responsibility; they all want to exploit others to fulfil the dreams they are too weak to realize themselves; they all want others to die so that they can live on in glory. Whenever one order is not obeyed, they claim they have been betrayed from the very beginning, that everyone has failed them, that they alone were able to accomplish the goals that took the lives of millions, that they alone deserve their honor and power. Such rantings may incur the label of asylum chants, but it is always too easy to impute evil to insanity (a favorite tactic of modern jurisprudence). Real reptilian evil is cold, calculating, and inexorably vengeful, quite the opposite of the madman who will often inflict his punishment on random people without cause or concern. And if you have always pictured the main character of this fine film as a lunatic, you may soon change your mind.

We begin with the real Traudl Junge, née Humps, shortly before her death a decade and a half ago, and we can say without fear of perjury that she does not rank among the earth's brightest mammals. Her tediously hackneyed comments might trick an ingenuous listener into thinking that she is both contrite and profound, but these are words that should never be used in conjunction with Traudl Junge. Junge belongs to that group of people who are easily impressed with the world (and, consequently, with the faces whose fame wreathes every newsstand) because they have nothing to contribute to it. So after we hear the real Junge, we meet her fictional understudy (Alexandra Maria Lara) trudging through the woods behind German soldiers in 1942 Munich. She is one of five young women who have volunteered to serve as the secretary to the Reich's chancellor (Bruno Ganz, in a role that guarantees his immortality), and you can see this obsession on their soft white faces as they lean over in unison to peer into his office. This is a matter of being a superstar, not a mass murderer the likes of which history has rarely seen. Ganz, like the historical figure he plays, is not a tall man, stooping, grizzled, his left hand fluttering behind him like wounded, dying game. He interviews the secretaries and picks Humps because she is from Munich and also probably because she is not too hard on the eyes. Despite her miserable failure in her first dictation she is awarded the job, yet another example of the typical impulsive and non-competitive methods of a totalitarian regime – which is where we realize this regime has much in common with a spoiled child who requires that his petty demands be met immediately. And at the peak of National Socialism's dominion another young person has been converted into a willing accomplice, if a rather clueless one. 

This brief introduction takes no more than ten minutes of a film that approaches one hundred and fifty. The rest will bring us to Berlin at the end of April 1945, starting from April 20, the leader's fifty-sixth birthday. The war has long since become an exercise in futility, the German population has been massacred, and even the mastermind behind the chaos wallows in self-doubt and, to a lesser degree, self-pity. Our film will cover his last ten days, from a celebration of his birth that involves no celebrating to his marriage that lasts barely a day, to his death by his own wicked hand. In a way, this is a biography of all he has wrought, from the destruction of his forces to his own, because all he left us with was destruction. He will walk, hunched over in imminent defeat, among his child soldiers and praise them for having greater fortitude than his generals; he will claim that the German people should be exterminated because this was their choice and they failed in their endeavor; he will scream at anyone who dares disobey the mildest of his whims, although he apparently has no idea about the debilitation of the German forces and their looming surrender. What you will never hear, however, is any self-rebuke. Not a word, not a phrase, not the hint of regret. When he confesses to an officer that he and his longtime companion Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) will be committing suicide, his main preoccupation is preventing the Russians from "displaying his body in a museum" like a stuffed beast plucked from the wilderness. That he is ignorant or blind or stupid about Germany's actual military might during his last inglorious days makes for an easy conclusion that he is mad. But he is not mad; not in the least. He is still the child that wants his will imposed above all else. When he orders the court martial and execution of his brother-in-law Fegelein (Thomas Kretschmann) and Braun pleads for the life of her sister's husband, he bristles at any resistance "to his will." His "will" – the same "will" in this film – suffices as an explanation because and only because he is their Leader. A fact that Braun accepts as she has accepted so much the last fifteen years without "actually knowing anything about him."

And it is here that all his propaganda, every last sentence dripping with hatred, intolerance, and misanthropy on the behalf of the Germanic peoples, is revealed to be nothing more than a prism for his own shortcomings and neuroses. He is not embodying the resentment of Versailles for the Germans; a whole nation is embodying his own resentment towards his own failures. A whole nation must fight his battles for him because he is a coward, a bully and, ultimately, a wretched excuse for a human being. He screams in histrionic tones about destiny, loyalty, and courage, but what of these noble characteristics has he ever shown Germany? In his "political testament" (which he dictates to Junge, who floats in and out of the film as scared and stupid as she was at the beginning) he announces that he has committed more than thirty years to the good of the German people, the same people he claims deserve their doom. Now it is true that he volunteered as a foreigner to fight in their ranks. But he fought for a sense of belonging, and out of despair, loneliness, and desire to join a violent cause to express his violent intentions. Germany and their allies served his purposes as much he served theirs. That equilibrium would soon be shattered by his insufferable arrogance and loathing of everyone and everything, and his debt to humanity may be greater than that of any other human being. This makes him a monster; but not in any way a madman.

On that point about human beings. Much positive and negative criticism of Downfall has focused on the humanization of the dictator who permanently ruined Germany's reputation (importantly, this was the first time in German cinema that he was featured as a protagonist), but such commentary misses the mark. The film's aim is not to humanize at all – their dictator was a human being, of course, albeit as close to devilry as man can come – but to depict events and interpretations of events without one key character missing, the centripetal force of the maelstrom that engulfed the center of European culture and ingenuity and turned it into one of history's most hideous regimes (making the title also an allusion to this famous work). Ganz's mannerisms and ticks are breathtakingly polished, and his voice has been said to be a near-perfect mimic of the original. When Braun gazes at a picture of him on a table, we have to blink a few times before deciding whether or not it is Ganz, since his performance in conviction and fluidity easily surpasses all other portrayals of the dictator ever made. Why Downfall is so perfect in its tones and colors is because it could be the template for the twilight of any despotic regime, any governance by force and hatred which attempted to take full control and no responsibility for an endless thirst for power, wealth, and honor. It is always the people's fault for voting for a megalomaniac, never the megalomaniac's fault for devising a plan to take over the world; it is always those who empower, often in very dire circumstances, rather than the empowered, who are to blame. And so why does he end up, as Braun laments, talking about nothing more than "dogs and vegetarian food"? Because one represents his distance from men and the other his distance from conventional habits and mores; one supposes that his vegetarianism also has to do with his love for animals and contempt for men. Yet both are individual urges that guide him, habits that interest no one else and which, in truth, have nothing to do with human interaction. That is why there might be nothing more evil than an abominably spoiled child who thinks he can do anything with impunity. And those initially deprived of such privileges often spend the rest of their lives trying to catch up.

Phoenix

This film will be always be known for its final scene, one of the most magnificent in late memory. But it is all that comes before it – the simple chamber drama of diffidence and greed, the apocalypse that nearly ended all chambers, all dramas, all greeds – that seems underwhelming until the viewer apprehends the coda. Indeed, he hears the coda before it is actually played, much as one might anticipate the final movement in a symphony because all prior movements must disembogue into a solitary note.

We begin with a most unusual scene: a female driver navigates a recently – from all indications, very recently – demilitarized zone. Now all is quiet and bright, like the future of this once-great country, but the scars remain. Scars in the literal sense when a sort of mummy appears in the passenger seat. The car is halted by a brash English-speaking soldier, whom the driver insists has not stumbled upon “Eva Braun,” which settles our time and place. The soldier nevertheless demands a closer inspection and, in short order, solemnly withdraws and apologizes. The women proceed – a reference to one of history’s most notorious concubines was not necessary to establish the figure’s gender – and arrive at a clinic for most desperate clients. There the surgeon identifies Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) as a member of a massacred minority, and yet the camera lingers on the woman still cloaked in plaster. Some options are confronted (“One cannot look exactly the way one was before”), and some decisions made. While overnighting in the hospital, our mummy wanders into the hallway only to spot a parallel shape and ambition a few doors down. They both end up in a room neither should have entered, a cabinet of memories, and who we think is our invisible woman cradles a photograph pinned to the wall. The picture may or may not contain her former self, but it is certainly outshined by the loutish smile of Johnny Lenz (Ronald Zehrfeld).

The lady who slowly unravels herself – literally and figuratively – is Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss). Nelly has just survived an unspeakable evil, one so incredible and all-encompassing that its mere endurance is considered a death of sorts; in fact, Nelly is presumed dead by her loutish husband and everyone else. Black-eyed and dented, she is driven by Lene to a pile of ghastly rubble only to be informed that what remains of her home is roughly akin to what remains of her immediate family, prompting Lene to propose a special ascent. Yet Nelly hesitates, and she hesitates because of a certain loutish smile. Nelly will seek out Johnny, because she believes only Johnny will be able to look past the internal and external wounds that have reduced her into a shadow, a grey pile of ash just like her namesake. She will find him as she left him, in a bar also named after a mythical bird, a bar once filled with the stiff, merciless soldiers who sought the annihilation of a people and a continent, now a venue of the vulgar filled with servicemen who obliterated those annihilators. But somehow he does not recognize her. She only resembles his wife, who cannot be anything except dead – and here I will permit myself an aside. We should not find it absurd that a woman could wish to remain in a country that tried to destroy her, especially if that country echoes with her language and her entire history. We should likewise eschew the temptation to judge survivors who simply wish the past to vanish during the day and resign themselves to hellish reminders each night. But what we can and should find absurd is that a woman like Nelly Lenz, once a well-known cabaret singer, could overlook a loutish smile and barrel of a gut, the only two features the viewer will ever remember about Johnny Lenz, once her accompanying pianist.  So when Johnny is arrested one terrible October afternoon when the war has already assumed its final turn, it will only take two days for his wife to be detained as well.  The trouble with this whole story, according to Lene, is that the accompanying pianist does not accompany his wife on what will likely be her final march, having been released the very same day of her arrest – and we should stop our revelations right there.

Some implausibilities surface in Phoenix that will distract the inexperienced viewer, until we realize that we are not being asked to measure plausibility. Instead, our task involves the will to live on the part of someone who has been subjected to atrocities no human should imagine much less sustain. Is the desire to regain what has been lost in whatever form possible, even if that form possesses but a loutish smile and a claim on an inheritance? Or is it the desire to recreate what once was yet in a different form, much like the holy land that Lene assures Nelly will provide them both with peace of body and soul? The question is never quite answered, because this is a Petzold production, and because Nelly has already ingested far too many questions. What she really wants is to become again the cabaret singer who, by dint of stealth, her husband's ingenuity, and a handful of friends, remained untainted by the evil around her for the vast majority of these wicked years. So when Lene shows her a picture of former acquaintances, she safely presumes that the crosses above their heads indicate their current non-existence on earth. "And what about the ones with circled heads?" she asks innocently, and is informed that those were the very opposite of innocent. Those familiar with German cinema and literature will detect a cynicism and slenderness of character development much more typical of their Gallic counterparts, which is unsurprising given the original story. They will also detect echoes of a French tale about a drowned woman in the Seine and a deranged surgeon, and yet another French tale that in time became one of the greatest of all cinematic accomplishments.  Unlike those two unusual productions, Petzold's work relies on its actors, especially on Hoss's superhuman talents, to render a very simple tale with steadily rising power. The film, grey and unsubstantial at its onset, resolves itself into concrete and glorious hues. And, as a certain cabaret singer might whisper, my ashes like the Phoenix may bring forth a bird that will revenge it on you all.

Yella

We begin this film observing a young woman, neither very attractive nor unworthy of a devoted rake's attention, escaping from an invisible predator. Invisible, because although someone will soon emerge as a long-time tormentor, the pace the woman keeps and the franticness of her stride bespeak a far greater nemesis, perhaps that of time or its knight-errant, conscience. She is not clearly innocent or clearly guilty as far as our eyes can see. But we soon learn that our eyes are substantially limited in what they are allowed to perceive.

Our location is this German town and the woman is a sensitive and somewhat troubled thirtysomething by the name of Yella Fichte (Nina Hoss). Yella is pretty in the way that many German women are pretty: that is, her tough character is imprinted squarely upon her delicate features, a pattern that no amount of makeup or clothing could ever alter. She is not so much a tomboy as a woman who cannot afford to be too feminine in a harsh and unforgiving man's world. One such fellow is her ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann), who just so happens to be tailing Yella in his Range Rover and begging for another chance on a relationship that Yella seems to regret with every ounce of her being. "You got a job," says Ben in an oddly high-pitched voice, "I can tell by the way you walk you have a really good job." Ben will often display how very well he knows his wife; yet we never get the impression of happier days past for the childless couple. Rather, Ben, unlike many men of his generation, appears once upon a time to have demonstrated decent earning potential. And in a small former East German town such lottery tickets are scarce. Our heroine breaks the news of her Hannover job to her bald, strapping father, an obvious widower, and we understand that she has been chosen by fate to smash the cycle of lucklessness and mediocrity and emigrate from Wittenberge to a more prosperous pocket of humanity. After a laconic breakfast during which Yella stares at her morose father with the glee of someone who enjoys being missed, she finds that instead of her taxi, an officious Ben has shown up to take her to the train station. 

Ben's agenda, of course, does not involve the station. Instead, Yella is subjected to a "sentimental tour" with a failed man's last business plan desperate even to the untrained ear, as well as a brown envelope stuffed with figures and calculations of a revival – numbers that Yella, an accountant by trade and demeanor, refuses to examine. What could she possibly learn now about this man whom she quite clearly abhors? What does it say about her that, once upon a time, she chose to marry him? Without the slightest verbal expression all these emotions race across her face, just as Ben loses his temper with the ease of those accustomed to violence, and just before the Range Rover swerves off a bridge and into the Elbe river – and here our film assumes a curious tenor. Yella awakes on what appears to be the other shore. Ben moves first then collapses near her. When she gets to her feet she finds, quite miraculously, that her bags have been washed ashore as well. When she arrives at the station she finds, quite miraculously, that her train has not left – even though it appears almost entirely empty. And after a quiet if nervous trip, she awakes again, this time in what must be assumed to be Hannover. It is, however, a Hannover that few will recognize, yet that is of no interest to our protagonist or any other person in her world. So many times in Yella we see one, almost trivial scene that we don't understand then later see a very similar scene and understand them both as significant, which is the sign of impeccable storytelling. A deposit on her hotel appears unpayable until she remembers the wad of cash her father silently pressed into her hand; her chance encounter with a creepy, venal man called Philipp (Devid Striesow) leads her into a business world of chicanery and double-dealings not unlike what probably bankrupted Ben; and Ben's implication of Yella's "pretty legs" having helped her secure the Hannover job are echoed by both Philipp's impression of her future employer, Dr. Schmidt-Ott, and the slimy doctor's own actions. Most of all, her notions of what belongs on this earth and what might pertain to another realm become decidedly fuzzy. Take, for example, her long stare at a kimonoed housewife and her child bidding farewell to a million-dollar husband on the driveway of their million-dollar home. This moment's inclusion early on in Yella's journey may simply manifest her wishes for a new life, but later developments suggest something far more sinister.  

It is to be expected, I suppose, that some critics have considered Yella an anti-capitalism parable; others, with no greater originality, have smugly pointed out Wittenberge's easternness and Hannover's unbroken alliance with the West. While there is some truth to these interpretations, they are hopelessly inferior to what we may term a grim character study. Why grim? Interestingly enough, the more we see of Yella, who evinces at times a doe-like quality, the less we like her. She is hard and cruel to the series of tribunals (in the form of Philipp's business partners) who, wishing to judge and dismiss her as a woman and possibly as an East German, are invariably humiliated by her methods. Once she consents to Philipp's skulduggery, she fails a test of confidence, which could spell death among thieves with an honor code. And while we do feel sorry for her when Ben reappears, more than once, to convey his understanding that the couple should reunite immediately, we also begin to suspect something deeper at work here. When Philipp informs our heroine that "a large garage, a green jaguar, kids, and a house in the suburbs" could never interest him ("What interests you, then?" asks Yella.  "Precisely not that," is the magnificent response), one has the feeling he is speaking for both of them. In fact, Philipp is quickly surpassed by his protégée in ruthlessness, as evidenced by the film's closing scenes. There is also the much belabored matter of the flashbacks Yella endures; water in particular seems to behave unusually in her presence, and in the distance she occasionally hears the caws of raptorial birds. So you may wonder why Yella never quite manages to change out of that lovely red blouse. You may also ask yourself why her last name is Fichte.

La Môme (La Vie en Rose)

For a number of reasons the English-speaking world has been unable to rid itself of what it has been in love with since the beginning of the nineteenth century: a French goddess, fair and free. It has ruminated in drunken bewilderment on this obsession, and has gone so far as to take lovers from all ends of the earth, the more exotic the better; it has whiled away the hours in disavowal of France's strengths, its virtues, its breath, its scent; but it has returned to it again and again as the one woman it cannot deny. France has much of what we have come to admire about Northern Europe – science, philosophy, aestheticism, a precise sense of justice, and a taste for danger tempered with a greater taste for truth. If Germany is indeed the epicenter of all modern thought and disciplines, France is a muse lingering astride the battlements, a waifish reminder of a life less structured or, I should say, less ordinarily structured. It is still remarkable that France, awash in hedonism, art, and beauty, is still a Catholic country that has no qualms about praising something greater that it cannot understand. The average Frenchman may no longer be a churchgoer, but a sense of order – greater order – allows him to live his life with the knowledge that it is not all in vain (Russians adhere to a similar philosophy, which would explain the long and fertile relationship that intellectuals from those countries have enjoyed). Perhaps a better description of the feeling one gets patrolling the streets of Paris or Lyon or Marseilles is one of cultural gentility, of a confidence wrought through centuries of apprenticeship and mastery, a knowledge of the world based on principles, beliefs, and institutions. And for all of France's history and achievement, this feeling is refreshing. It is refreshing because our world today is still being assaulted by nihilists in the guise of cultural theoreticians who wish to posit relativism, contradiction, taboo, and irony as the lonely breakwaters in an ocean of nothingness and insignificance. Yet if these same theoretical men were to descend the ghat to the water they hope will flood everything civilized, proper, and beatific, they will espy in this blueness only their own loathsome specters. France, a resting place of many of these dullards, will always be the beacon of culture amidst the pagan hordes. And the songs it will sing in joyous abandon may very well resemble the soundtrack to this recent film.    

The story of Édith Piaf, née Gassion (Marion Cotillard) has the familiar ring of tragedy. Born in an immigrant-laden district of Paris to parents with Italian and Algerian blood, Gassion struggled repeatedly against hunger, destitution, and lack of respect – the plague of the poor – only to struggle later in life with alcoholism, drug abuse, embezzlement, and exhaustion – the plague of the wealthy. Along the way she would meet the usual passel of pimps, criminals, prostitutes, and other underworld surlies; some of her most tender moments are shared with a woman of ill repute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) in the brothel run by her grandmother, a very convenient place for her father to abandon her. Once he finally returns and takes her away kicking and screaming (how a child can emerge with a semblance of security from such a setup is beyond conventional mores to guess) the waif Gassion (la môme of the original French title) has been sufficiently exposed to violence, cruelty, and lives without the possibility of change and improvement to know that she may not have much time on this earth and she'd best make good use of it. 

Thereupon, and at the behest of her father, a professional contortionist, Gassion begins to sing. She drifts away from family (her mother, whose alcoholism would be passed on to her daughter, makes a brief and jarring appearance) and into circles of people who care about her even less but are enamored with her potential. In time and for stage purposes, she is dubbed "Piaf," "sparrow" in the local argot and representative of her diminutive size and powerful voice. There is the usual assortment of backstabbings, blowups, organized criminals, and one passionate affair with the polar opposite of Piaf – a famous boxer who was world champion until he lost to this American prizefighter and subject of another well-known film. The last years slip by in a wicked haze of ill-advised cocktails, iller health, and failed concerts, none of which did much to diminish her fame in the eyes of the general public – the sign of a true icon. When Piaf cannot perform, there are always her records, passed around like some inexorable drug, and the masses stay satisfied. When she dies and is denied Catholic rites for, among other things, having had an affair with a married man, thousands gather at this famous cemetery to hum her songs until their notes turn to tears.

I have not detailed many of the film's twists and turns because they are all predictable yet, to the best of our knowledge, quite accurate. Given filmmakers' tendencies to romanticize and re-imagine their subjects' existence, one shudders to think of the misery and suffering that Piaf actually endured in her brief years, addled as she was by both fame and the contents of its barroom. That said, the real reason to see the film, apart from the music that may or may not have been part of your youth (it was certainly part of mine), is Cotillard. Thanks to skill, a constellation of genetic similarities, and clever cinematography, she transforms her very pretty self into the miniature cannonball that was Piaf with nary a seam or thread showing. The performance is extraordinary and utterly unexpected by us ignorant cinéastes who had only seen her work in some rather mediocre French films – the less said about them the better – and this adaptation of a book about southern France, its vineyards, and what can happen to people who actually take time to smell the roses. That's why "life through rose-colored glasses" (the English title and trademark song by Piaf) had as little to do with Piaf's life as the sentimental sweetness of her tunes has to do with many facets of our modern existence. But for a while, and perhaps longer, we can be convinced otherwise. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.