GRACE OF MONACO

I wrote of Olivier Dahan's movie LA VIE EN ROSE, that is contained a stunning central performance but baffling direction. Well, his GRACE OF MONACO has neither a stunning central performance, nor an improvement in the direction, but has something, just something that I found intriguing. But first, the obviously bad.

The story should've been intriguing. It is one of an iconic American movie star - one of Hitchcock's famous blondes, who traded it all for an arranged marriage to an ageing lothario who also happened to be the monarch of a bankrupt French protectorate. She must've known full well of Monaco's precarious situation behind the glamorous facade of the casinos. So why did she do it? And did she really expect to be allowed to act after she did?  But sadly this movie joins the story after Grace Kelly's marriage. She already has two children and though rarely seeing her husband and cold-shouldered at court, seems to be in love with him. Alfred Hitchcock offers her the lead role in Marnie, but she turns it down, because she's going to support her husband and never act again.  

This should have been a moving and deeply relevant film about the conflicts that career women face and a sorry tale of delusion after a whirlwind marriage. But instead, what we have is a very cursory attempt to show conflict - essentially Nicole Kidman's Grace looking disturbed into the middle distance, or humiliated for having a short haircut at luncheon - but no real emotion or excitement.  Rather the message of the film is essentially a conservative one - that it is the job of a woman to stand by her man for the sake of her children and sacrifice her own concerns. And if she needs to have a PRINCESS DIARIES makeover at the hands of a highly camp French Count played by Derek Jacobi, why then, all the better!

This is a movie of surfaces - beautiful costumes, beautiful locations, but not NOT beautiful people. I'm sorry but I'm just going to have to say it. Nicole Kidman is simply too old to play Grace of Monaco.  The wigs are too obviously wigs.  The botox and fillers insufficiently obfuscated by the soft focus.  It's hard to hear the message of the film - about the grim artifice behind the fairtytale - when the grim artifice is all too visible.  Of course one could forgive all this - I was once moved to tears by Mark Rylance's Cleopatra - were the acting sufficiently good.  And if it isn't, from an actress as worthy as Nicole Kidman, should we perhaps blame the director, the clumsy Dahan, or first-time screen writer Arash Amel?  Or should we, per Dahan, blame producer and extreme-editor Harvey Weinstein who has all but disowned the film?

I'm not sure, but what's utterly frustrating is that there is something to this film - and that's in its politics.  After all, this was a fascinating period for Monaco and for Grace's husband Prince Rainier. He inherited a poor kingdom dependent on gambling and tried to limit the power of the monarchy, widen the economic base and redistribute wealth.   He did so in the teeth of an economic blockade from a France desperate for tax revenues to finance the Algerian war.  All of this intrigue - the sticky hands of Ari Onassis (a ludicrous hack-impression from Robert Lindsay) - the attempted coup by his sister - are true and bear further investigation.  But one can't take the attempt seriously when Dahan/Amel want us to believe that the best way to create a red-herring baddie is to dress her in Miss Haversham-black.  Or when they want us to believe that the diplomatic crisis was solved by the giving of a ball and a Don't Cry For Me, Monte Carlo speech.  Shame on them all for not tackling the gritty issues - is a tax haven really the poster child for democratic liberty? - and all their contradictions. 

GRACE OF MONACO played Cannes 2014 where it was excoriated by the press. It opened in May in France, Germany, Italy, Kuwait, Finland, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Estonia, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Israel and Lithuania. It opened earlier this month in Australia, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Taiwan, South Korea and China. It opens in Japan in October and in Brazil on January 1st 2015.

LA MOME - LA VIE EN ROSE - stunning central performance; baffling direction

Writer-director Olivier Dahan and co-writer Isabelle Sobelman have fashioned a biopic of Edith Piaf that is infuriating in its narrative structure. The movie flits back and forth through the iconic singer's life like a demented squirrel. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and inter-cut scenes add nothing to the viewer's understanding of her character or motivations. Far from enlightening us and drawing perceptive links, they confuse and infuriate Even within a scene, the director affects attention deficit disorder. The most grievous offense is in the final scene where Piaf - her whole bitter-sweet life building to this moment - sings "Non, je ne regrette rien". All good directors know that when a performer is giving their all in an iconic moment the best thing you can do is keep the camera firmly on them. Think of Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles singing her final song, "Life is a Cabaret" or when John Travolta does his solo dance number in Saturday Night Fever. The key is to let the talent do the talking without any flash camera-work or too many cuts. Olivier Dahan, however, cannot resist cutting away from Marion Cotillard's breath-taking performance. He switches to pictures of Piaf as a little girl; Piaf making a death-bed revelation; Piaf in Paris. It all serves to under-mine what should be the triumphant, heart-breaking finale.

Not only in this biographical material badly organised and badly directed, the choices concerning what to show and what to omit are bizarre. The exact nature of her relationship with her "sister", Momone, is left vague; the fact that she had a child is only revealed in the denouement for no clear reason; and World War Two doesn't seem to happen at all!

The miracle is that the film survives the baffling directorial choices. The reason is partly that it is handsomely designed, beautifully photographed, well-scored and exceptionally well-acted. Marion Cotillard's performance as Piaf is astounding. She plays Piaf from a teenager to death and is convincing at every age and in every mood. But the supporting cast are also strong, with an especially strong performance from Testud.

The other obvious reason is that however you slice it, dice it and genrally dick around with it, Piaf's life is fascinating and the material is mostly all there once you decipher the running order. Edith was born in 1915, the daughter of a singer and an acrobat, and grand-daughter of a brothel keeper. By the time she was discovered by an impresario (Depardieu), she had already lived with whores, travelled with a circus, taken up with the alcoholic Momone, lost a child to meningitis and become embroiled with the mafia. After the murder of the impresario, she retrained as a music hall singer and achieved worldwide fame. She found love with the married boxer Marcel Cerdan, who tragically died in a plane crash. Later she married twice, suffered in a horrific car-crash and became addicted to morphine. She died young - her body exhausted and racked by arthritis, cancer and drug addiction. Throughout it all, the film suggests, she never lost her faith, her willingness to love and to live a full life.

This is, then, a grand story that befits a great spirit and iconic singer. Cotillard's performance does Piaf justice. It is a shame that Dahan's directorial choices did not.

LA MOME - LA VIE EN ROSE played Berlin 2007 and has already been released in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Canada, Greece, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Lebanon, Denmark, Taiwan, Slovenia, Span, Italy, Argentina, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the USA, Iceland and Hungary It opens in the UK on June 22nd, in Australia and Russia on July 12th, in Singapore on July 26th, in Turke on August 3rd and in New Zealand in September.