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23 June 2007

La Vie en Rose

This is a movie for knitters.

This movie is about Edith Piaf, the French singer, and apparent knitter. Not a very likable character, and quite irresponsible, but a knitter nonetheless.

Pay close attention the great handknits in this movie, which basically spans the years 1918 to 1963. What a great period for handknits. My favorite.

I think the costume designer must be an avid knitter. Either that, or she did exceptional research into Piaf and the times and insisted on the luxury of handknitted items, which are, of course, so much more expensive and time consuming to produce. (The topic of costume designers and budget restrictions is definitely a separate, sad post.)

Anyhow, my knitter friends will appreciate this movie. We knitters always expect to see great knitted items in retro movies, but it seldom occurs.

Check out the great red knitted cape that the overweight prostitute wears when she's taking little Edith out for a walk. It's great. So vibrant. I was trying to determine the stitch, but I couldn't from the distance. Then I realized it doesn't really matter what the stitch is; the red says it all.

Which got me thinking that I might should knit something in red. I mean fire engine red, candy apple red. Red red red. I have only ever knitted the red socks, which are only worn in the privacy of my own home. But I think I could do with a red scarf. This is definitely something to consider.

In the graveyard scene, one of the prostitutes is wearing an interesting handknitted hap shawl, hap as in the Shetland wool hap shawls. I'm not a fanatic about inserting white wavy fields of striping into a dark brown background, but nonetheless, it's a nice handknit. I can appreciate the knitting skill without wanting to own it.

Young ten-year-old Edith wears this great tan turtleneck of seed stitch, with a button enclosure on one shoulder. I need to make this sweater, but larger and for me. And not in seed stitch. And not tan. OK, what I really like about this sweater is the shoulder buttons. They are great.

OK, not to talk about every single handknit in the movie......but can I just mention the hats that the two twenty-year-olds are wearing, when Edith is singing in the street? They are so obviously hand knit, which is great. And look truly vintage. Of course, a French girl singing on the streets of Paris should wear a beret.

There is an interesting scene where Edith is going on stage, for the first time. A sweater is specifically knit for this performance, however all but one sleeve is finished. So, they wrap a large printed fabric shawl around her shoulders to camouflage the missing sleeve. It's hilarious. How many of we knitters have ever done such a thinig?

Notice the sailor outfit that Edith wears during the New Year's scene of 1936. It's great. I can give you 3000 words about that sailor cap and the red pom-pom on top, its origin and development. That's basically what I wrote my Master's dissertation on, the sailor uniform. Who knew.

When Edith is practicing with her maestro and the pianist, in the year 1947, notice her red cardigan with white bow. You can't miss it. It's great. It would be interesting to perhaps design a cardigan with an integrated bow or, better, a flower corsage. It's nice to give a little three-dimensionality to a garment.

On a millinery note, Edith wears a great hat in the scene where she is dining with the boxer. From the front, it looks like a generic red/maroon pillbox. But from the back, it's interesting to see that it's really just a halo, I'm sure constructed of buckram, wired, then covered in felt, with velvet pin-stitched hither and thither, to create that great bubbled surface. I love it.

Now I don't claim to be an Edith Piaf expert. Alls I know about her is what I learned while working in a certain millinery studio for a certain well-known milliner: and in said studio, I learned about her work during the French Resistance. (Millinery studios are generally chatty because you are all basically sitting around, hand stitching, which is not unlike knitting, and the situation prompts discussion.)

Of course I had heard Edith Piaf's songs before. They are iconic, and seemingly always linked to World War Two (one of my favorite wars).

But in this movie, there is almost no mention of the war, or the Resistance, which is a shame. I wonder what she did during the war. I wonder why the movie, long as it was, tended to focus on her "insanity" rather than other things. This movie left a lot of open questions for me.

I know that much has been written about the relationship between mental health and crafty pursuits. Aren't most of us happier when knitting, or quilting, or whatever it is that we do?

Speaking of knitting and mental health, in college (in Texas in 1984) I had a roommate in the dorm, as you do. Four weeks into the fall semester, she flipped out. It was all very weird and impressionable to my nineteen-year-old mind. Within 48 hours, she was packed and her parents had moved her out of the dorm and had flown her back to Chicago. She dropped out of college, which is no light matter. Dropped out in September. They said that she'd had a nervous breakdown. At nineteen.

Nonetheless, come January, she was back in the dorm, and looking great ("normal") and laughing her usual laugh. She told me that she had just taken it easy in Chicago, hanging out at her parents' house, from September to January. I distinctly remember asking her what she did while there. After all, she killed a whole semester, doing nothing.

She said she wasn't doing nothing. She had learned to knit. In September, as soon as she arrived in Chicago, her mother decided that my roommate needed to knit. And so for four months, my roommate knit and knit through the cold Chicago fall and winter, and she showed me her accomplishments. I remember she pulled out two fully completed sweaters: One solid sweater, and one with stripes. She was quite proud of them, and she was a bonafide compulsive knitter.

This idea of knitting through craziness or loneliness or depression is interesting. Sometimes you just need that little bridge to get you from one side of the river to the other, ya know? Knitting can be that bridge.

In the movie, Edith Piaf is often seen knitting, or talking about knitting. It's interesting, near the end of the movie, she is sitting on the beach, knitting, and the journalist asks her, "Who are you knitting for?" and she replies, "Whoever will wear my sweater."

So, this movie, despite its irresponsible main character, gets the rating of Two Knitting Needles Up. I hope you like it as much as I did.

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