MOVIE REVIEW : ‘EDITH AND MARCEL’ . . . AND FRIENDS

Claude Lelouch’s elaborate “Edith and Marcel” (at the Monica, Los Feliz and Town & Country) should rightfully be called “Edith and Marcel and Margot and Jacques” because it’s as much about a fictional French couple as it is about their idols, the great Edith Piaf, France’s tragic “little sparrow,” and the love of her life Marcel Cerdan, the world middleweight boxing champion. Lelouch apparently believed he couldn’t celebrate the legend of Piaf and Cerdan without creating another couple to demonstrate its impact on the French people.

Yet the time given to the dreamy, aristocratic Margot (Evelyne Bouix) and her prisoner-of- war pen pal Jacques (Jacques Villeret, Lelouch’s plump, perennial Everyman) would have been better spent on illuminating Edith (also played by Bouix) and Cerdan (Marcel Cerdan Jr.) more thoroughly. There’s much that’s entertaining--meticulous period settings and costumes, the ideal casting of Bouix (who painstakingly lip-syncs Piaf standards), but the film is marred by an increasingly pointless and tedious over-emphasis on the fictional couple.

“Edith and Marcel” opens in New York in 1949 with Piaf’s long-time manager (Jean-Claude Brialy) having to tell her of Cerdan’s death in a plane crash while on his way to see the singer. As she hysterically blames herself for this, we flash back to 1939, when both of them, at 24, simultaneously reach the threshhold of fame.

Lelouch now switches over to Margot and Jacques, and it’s one full hour into this two-hour, 20-minute film before we get back to Edith and Marcel who finally are introduced in a Paris nightclub but still don’t begin their affair until they meet again some time later. (Lelouch assures us that “Destiny, like the postman, always rings twice.”) At this point, “Edith and Marcel” settles down to become a fairly conventional backstage-cum-locker room film bio, although Margot and Jacques resurface eventually--but only to remind us wearily how little they really have to do with Edith and Marcel whom they actually don’t seem to idolize as much as they do Scarlett and Rhett.

Perversely, we get to know Margot and Jacques better than Edith and Marcel whom we scarcely get to know at all. What did Edith think about Marcel having a wife and two children (plus a third on the way) in conveniently distant Casablanca? (She was, nevertheless, able to say of her lover that “he was so pure that when he looked at me I felt cleansed.”) What did she think about the negative effect their affair was having on his boxing career? What about Marcel’s constant lies to his wife and the press that he and Edith were “just friends.” What, for that matter, does Lelouch really think of them or their behavior? We’re left to surmise that because we’re aware of Piaf’s Dickensian past and tragic future we’re supposed to regard her as a woman desperately and understandably clutching at happiness.

Despite this lack of dimension in Lelouch’s conception, the sharp-featured Bouix is a remarkable Piaf, suggesting at once her vulnerability and tenacity with distinctive, bird-like movements. Clearly she was capable of greater depths had Lelouch provided them. She also has charm as the younger, prettier Margot.

Cast as his own father after the originally-set Patrick Dewaere committed suicide, Cerdan Jr., as a non-actor, probably benefits from the slenderness of his part. As a former boxer himself, he has an attractively rugged and authentically mauled fighter’s face and is at ease under Lelouch’s direction; he also has enough natural charm and presence to distract attention from the fact that, having been born in 1943, he is really too old to play his father for all his close physical resemblance to him.

Claude Lelouch is one of the screen’s unabashed romantics whose films frequently are as much celebrations of the collective experience of the French people as they are about individuals. His bravura flourishes and unbridled emotions tend to work against him almost as often as they work for him. When it all comes together for him--when form and substance strike a balance as they did, for example, in “And Now My Love,” a Lelouch film can be an unalloyed delight. Even when they don’t mesh, as “Edith and Marcel” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes), doesn’t, his films are rarely without their pleasures.

‘EDITH AND MARCEL’

A Miramax Films release of a Les Films 13-Parafrance production. Executive producer Tania Zazulinsky. Writer-producer-director-camera operator Claude Lelouch. Collaboration on screenplay and dialogue Pierre Uytterhoeven, Gilles Durieux. Director of photography Jean Boffety. Music Francis Lai. Art director Jacques Bufnoir. Costumes Catherine Leterrier. With Evelyne Bouix, Marcel Cerdan Jr., Charles Aznavour, Jacques Barbaret, Francis Huster, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean Bouise, Charles Gerard, Charlotte de Turckheim, Micky Sebastien. In French, with English subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes. Times-rated: Mature.