Starring: Marion Cotillard, G�rard Depardieu, Sylvie Testud, Clotilde Courau, Jean-Paul Rouve
Directed by: Oliver Dahan
She was the daughter of a street singer and a circus acrobat. She was dumped by her mother with her father, who dumped her with his mother, who ran a brothel. In childhood, diseases rendered her temporarily blind and deaf. She claimed she was cured by St. Therese, whose shrine the prostitutes took her to. One of the prostitutes adopted her, until her father returned, snatched her away, and put her to work in his act. From her mother and the prostitute she heard many songs, and one day when his sidewalk act was doing badly, her father commanded her, "Do something." She sang "La Marseilles." And Edith Piaf was born.
Piaf. The French word for "sparrow." She was named by her first impresario, Louis Leplee. He was found shot dead not long after -- possibly by a pimp who considered her his property. She stood 4 feet, 8 inches tall, and so became "the Little Sparrow." She was the most famous and beloved French singer of her time -- of the century, in fact -- and her lovers included Yves Montand (who she discovered) and the middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan. She drank too much, all the time. She became addicted to morphine, and required ten injections a day. She grew old and prematurely stooped, and died at 47.
Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose," one of the best biopics I've seen, tells Piaf's life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard, who looks like the singer. The title, which translates loosely as "life through rose-colored glasses," is from one of Piaf's most famous songs, which she wrote herself. She is known for countless other songs perhaps most poignantly for "Non je ne regrette rien" ("No, I regret nothing"), which is seen in the film as her final song; if it wasn't, it should have been.
How do you tell a life story to chaotic, jumbled and open to chance as Piaf's? Her life did not have an arc but a trajectory. Joy and tragedy seemed simultaneous. Her loves were heartfelt but doomed; after she begged the boxer Cerdan to fly to her in New York, he was killed in the crash of his flight from Paris. Her stage triumphs alternated with her stage collapses. If her life resembled in some ways Judy Garland's, there is this difference: Garland lived for the adulation of the audience, and Piaf lived to do her duty as a singer. From her earliest days, from the prostitutes, her father and her managers, she learned that when you're paid, you perform.
Oh, but what a performer she was. Her voice was loud and clear, reflecting her early years as a street singer. Such a big voice for such a little woman. At first she sang mechanically, but was tutored to improve her diction and express the meaning of her words. She did that so well that if you know what the words "Non je ne regrette rien" mean, you can essentially feel the meaning of every other word in the song.
Dahan and his co-writer, Isabelle Sobelman, move freely through the pages of Piaf's life. A chronology would have missed the point. She didn't start here and go there; she was always, at every age, even before she had the name, the little sparrow. The action moves back and forth from childhood to final illness, from applause to desperation, from joy to heartbreak (particularly in the handling of Cerdan's last visit to her).
This mosaic storytelling style has been criticized in some quarters as obscuring facts (quick: how many times was she married?). But think of it this way: Since there are, in fact, no wedding scenes in the movie, isn't it more accurate to see husbands, lovers, friends, admirers, employees and everyone else as whirling around her small, still center? Nothing in her early life taught her to count on permanence or loyalty. What she counted on was singing, champagne, infatuation and morphine.
Many biopics break down in depicting their subjects in old age, and Piaf, at 47, looked old. Gene Siskel once referred to an actor's old-age makeup as making him look like a turtle. In "La Vie en Rose" there is never a moment's doubt. Even the hair is right; her frizzled, dyed, thinning hair in the final scenes matches the real Piaf in the videos I cite below. The only detail I can question is her resiliency after all-night drinking sessions. I once knew an alcoholic who said, "If I wasn't a drinker and I woke up with one of these hangovers, I'd check myself into the emergency room."
Then there are the songs, a lot of them. I gather from the credits that some are dubbed by other singers, some are sung by Piaf herself, and some, in parts at least, by Cotillard. In the video clips you can see how Piaf choreographed her hands and fingers, and Cotillard has that right, too. If a singer has been dead 50 years and sang in another language, she must have been pretty great to make it onto so many saloon jukeboxes, which is how I first heard her. Now, of course, she's on my iPod, and I'm listening to her right now.
An unusual dilemma faces one French suburban family. Their little boy, Ludovic (George du Fresne), has taken it into his head that he's a little girl. His parents, Hanna (Michele Laroque) and Pierre (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), are understandably less than over the moon about this. Ludovic can't seem to stay out of Mama's closet, he filches the role of Snow White in his school play and is bent on marrying his classmate, Jerome (Julien Riviere). The fact that Jerome is the son of Pierre's boss somewhat complicates things. Formerly friendly neighbors turn hostile, Ludovic is expelled from his school, Pierre is fired and the family is forced to move. Parental attitudes change, with the once tolerant Hanna becoming outwardly hostile to her son, while Pierre, a former bastion of machismo, slowly comes to accept Ludovic's forthright individuality.
For all its highly piquant subject matter, My Life in Pink (Ma Vie en Rose) is, above all, the story of a family. Director Alain Berliner and screenwriter Chris vender Stappen have created one of the most authentic, touching households ever put on film. It's a far, welcome cry from the motley, phony convention of stars-as-blood-relations that American audiences have become accustomed to (Parenthood, Home for the Holidays). The family's interrelations are both funny and perfectly apt. Little Ludo has a different, intimate bond with, say, his one teenage sister than his more conventional brothers. He's naturally close to his mother and, especially, his grandmother, a real sympatico free spirit (charmingly played by Helene Vincent). If unsure about what he is, he nevertheless knows exactly what he wants and has no problem coming up with 'scientific' theories about his misplaced X chromosome to explain it all. He has an active fantasy life, as well, obviously, exemplified by his dream world featuring Pam and Ben, a Gallic version of Barbie and Ken dolls, who have their own resplendently tacky musical TV show. These scenes are a triumph of Veronique Melery's and Eve Romboz's production design and FX, saturated with psychedelic colors and doll's-house miniatures, an enchanting, infinitesimal Oz. Alain Berliner's direction has just the right, deft tone, picking up on the everyday influences which can easily feminize an interiorized little boy not into sports or gunplay. Television's all-too accessible cheesy glamour, Madonna-esque disco songs wafting out of radios and, always, the close presence of women, be it his relations or the gabby neighborhood coven of housewives, all contribute to the path of an androgyne.
As the beset parents, Laroque and Ecoffey are both sensational. She initially has the typical Frenchwoman's awe-inspiring elan that is the envy of the world, and is both delightful pal and Mom to her brood. Her patience is eventually worn to a frazzle, however, by the havoc Ludovic's behavior wreaks on their lives, and she becomes a domestic fury, sans any pandering for audience sympathy. (Her enraged shearing of the martyred Ludo's long hair has weird echoes of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.) Ecoffey, for his part, manages to imbue his role of orthodox Dad with a wealth of muted sensitivity. (The most moving moment in the film comes when, seconds after berating Ludovic for his girlishness, he immediately re-bonds with him by taking him by the hand.) It becomes apparent that, for all of Ludovic's misfit status, it is really his parents who've become lost in a world of stifling convention; he is, for the most part, uncannily sure of himself. Solemn little Du Fresne bears a froggy resemblance to the young Leslie Caron and acts without the slightest trace of precociousness. (It should be said that all of the children's performances here are blessedly devoid of the cutes.) He has a gawky grace when he vogues along to 'Pam's Theme,' and is delicious in the one moment when, to prove his prepubescent heterosexuality, he suddenly hitches up his crotch before attempting to kiss his first girl. His preternatural, wide-eyed deadpan calm, however, could have been enlivened by more of the luxuriant sissiness Brandon De Wilde displayed so unforgettably in The Member of the Wedding, or that of Brett Barsky in the more recent short, Trevor.
Most music biopics follow a familiar arc, and in some ways Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose appears no different: a childhood of pain and poverty, false steps and shaky beginnings, a mentor or two, wild times on the road, discovery, debauchery, success, fame, death.
But this brilliant account of the life of Edith Piaf - the French songbird, born of the streets and the brothels, who became a cultural icon for a nation - visits the usual benchmarks, juggles them around, emphasizes sharp detail over seismic events, and delivers the portrait of a life that is vividly, explosively real.
Populated with whores and boxers, thugs and impresarios, the low and the mighty, La Vie en Rose covers two World Wars and a whirlwind of history, zooming in on the big, doleful eyes - and big, beautiful voice - of the woman nicknamed "la m�me," the kid, "the Little Sparrow."
As portrayed by Marion Cotillard, in a performance that has to be recognized when Oscar time rolls around, Piaf comes off as uniquely talented and tortured, a strong-willed woman whose rough childhood and impoverished early years forged a fiery soul - in the frailest and most abused (drugs, alcohol, you name it) of bodies.
Lip-synching (perfectly), Cotillard transforms herself from the plucky street crooner with the lesbian sidekick to a grande dame of the music world, and all phases between. She is, quite simply, amazing. The actress (A Good Year, A Very Long Engagement) brings new meaning to the word transformation: There isn't a second of screen time when you'll find yourself thinking that you're watching an actor at work. With Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, you are witnessing some kind of unexplainable, extraordinary inhabitation.
Filmmaker Dahan - heretofore known for a slick Luc Besson-produced thriller and a pretty good Isabelle Huppert drama, La Vie Promise - toggles around the decades, getting great supporting work from Sylvie Testud, Emmanuelle Seigner, Gerard Depardieu, Clotilde Courau, Jean-Pierre Martins (as Piaf's prizefighter lover, Marcel Cerdan) and a pair of magnetic kid actors who portray Piaf at the ages of 5 and 10. Jettisoning any sort of straightforward chronology, Dahan instead creates a timeline of emotional moments, of unimagined lows and highs, and of the supremely gifted, maddeningly difficult woman at its center.
For Piaf fans, La Vie en Rose is a must-see. For fans yet-to-be, Dahan and Cotillard's film is an opportunity rich with discovery.
French actress Marion Cotillard delivers a tour de force as legendary singer �dith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose," an otherwise conventional and sometimes confusing portrait about yet another tortured musical genius.
Director Olivier Dahan claims he "didn't want to make a biopic," but that's precisely what he's done. He's just tried to cover his tracks by repeatedly cutting back and forth between scenes set decades apart, as if the reels were shown out of order.
Fractured biopics were in vogue a few years ago but have fallen out of favor for a good reason: A musical biopic especially needs to be mostly chronological to appreciate the performances in the context of a character's development, as in "Walk the Line" and "Ray."
Piaf (1915-1963) shared drug addiction with the subjects of those films as well as with Judy Garland, a near-contemporary who had a turbulent life that seems almost placid compared to Piaf's.
Born to a caf�-singer mother and a contortionist father, Piaf was raised by her fraternal grandmother, who ran a brothel. Cotillard plays the diminutive singer (4-foot-8) from the time Piaf is 14, when she joins her father as a street singer. She soon sets off on her own, becomes pregnant and loses her only child in infancy to meningitis.
She's discovered by nightclub owner Louis Lepl�e (G�rard Depardieu, briefly), who names her La Mome Piaf (The Sparrow Kid) and gets her a recording contract. But he's murdered, and for some reason Piaf is suspected - one of many things that are inadequately explained in this movie.
Piaf is acquitted and begins her rise to stardom. The movie mostly skips World War II, when she worked with the Resistance, and her affair with prot�g� Yves Montand.
A good portion of this lavishly produced film is set in a weakly evoked postwar U.S., where she became a temperamental diva and carried on a doomed affair with married boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). But her relationship with him - or with her lifelong friend, Momone (Sylvie Testud) - is never really fleshed out.
Through this all, there are flash-forwards of the ill, aging and finally dying Piaf. They begin with her collapse at a 1957 concert in New York and climax with her triumphant Paris comeback in 1960.
Thanks to the extraordinary performance of Cotillard, who expertly lip- syncs to Piaf recordings and disappears into the part, few will regret seeing "La Vie En Rose," named after a famous Piaf tune. Just brace yourself for a film of unvarying intensity that seems longer than its 140-minute running time.
Biography of French singer Edith Piaf (Cotillard). Neglected by her mother, Edith is brought up by her grandmother and then by her father, a travelling acrobat. The street singer is discovered and rises to fame, determined to work even when dying.
French beauty Marion Cotillard adopts a waddle and a throaty drawl for this biopic of eccentric singer Edith Piaf, who apparently had a life packed with more scandal and incident than a hundred Rays or Walk The Lines, even if some of the beats � impoverished childhood, drug addiction � sound familiar. The settings are certainly colourful: she grows up in a whorehouse and a circus. As Piaf seeks her fortune, the scene shifts to the smoky bars of 1930s Paris, where she hits the big time and the bottle (she�s barely shown sober from this point on).
Sex, drugs and booze make for plenty of drama as Piaf�s over-indulgence raises eyebrows and causes conflict with friends and associates. It�s also refreshing to see a physically awkward heroine whose path to success is peppered with both tragedy and faux pas: this is no wish-fulfilment drama. And Cotillard puts in a passionate performance, stooping and squashing her face into an impressively faithful take on Piaf that is utterly lacking in vanity.
Structurally, though, La Vie En Rose has almost as many problems as the troubled singer. Scenes of her youth are broken up by deathbed moments set decades later, which may provide an insight into her stubborn character, but are an unwelcome interruption. It�s harder to fully empathise with the hopes and dreams of the young Piaf when you�re frequently reminded of the wizened, drug-addled woman she became. And for some reason, one crucial chapter of her youth is revealed only in flashback at the very end.
There�s also little sense of Piaf�s relationship with her music, other than her insistence that she must sing at all costs. Some perfunctory explanations of her influences are given: scenes of her mother singing; sessions with a tutor/mentor who teaches her to enunciate and gesticulate, but these feel pointed and distant from the character herself. Fans of her music, though, can seek comfort in the Piaf-heavy soundtrack and the performance scenes.
La Vie En Rose presents a Piaf that is fascinating, but hard to relate to. Far from being an everywoman, she is difficult, extraordinary and tragic, and the film�s flashback-heavy structure is so full of incident that it leaves little room for insight into her complex character.
A far-from-rosy life story makes this lengthy biopic entertaining, but despite a strong lead performance it fails to get under Piaf�s skin.
Sick of the same old thing at the megaplex? Here's an offering that's not from the Hollywood pipeline.
"La Vie en Rose" has one of those amazing physical transformations at its center, as young actress Marion Cotillard ages into legendary French singer Edith Piaf on the screen.
Marion Cotillard works under heavy makeup to portray Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose."
By the end, when alcohol and drug abuse have reduced Piaf's body to wreckage, the beauty who wooed Russell Crowe in "A Good Year" looks more like Gollum.
Emotionally, Cotillard portrays Piaf as a blunt instrument - not unlike her blaring voice, which can feel as if it's literally grabbing your ears. She comes across as more fond of the diva lifestyle that her talent allows than the talent itself.
Perhaps by the time she began to taste the good life, she felt as if she had deserved it. Abandoned by both parents at different times and raised for a period in a brothel run by her grandmother, Piaf's first stage was the street.
Considering the wild details of Piaf's life - a childhood stint with her father in a circus, a romance with world-champion boxer Marcel Cerdan - "La Vie en Rose" is a fairly staid, conventional picture, one that hits all the familiar biopic beats.
Director Olivier Dahan could hardly fail with this sort of material, but that doesn't mean he's necessarily done it justice.
In the spirit of Edith Piaf's signature song, I regret nothing about "La Vie en Rose" -- not the narrative confusion, not the sketchy details, not the lack of historical context or the music-video editing. Olivier Dahan's phantasmagorical biopic gives us a brilliant performance by Marion Cotillard as the passionate, tortured Piaf, and Ms. Cotillard gives us something new in a show-business portrait -- a sense of what the song does to the singer.
The process reveals itself early in the time-hopping film, when Piaf stands on stage to sing her imperishable "Milord," a mini-drama that progresses from jaunty to tender to frightening. It's clear that the passage of time has already taken a terrible toll. France's premiere chanteuse looks empty, spent, a weary soul waiting for the fix that only music can provide. Then the orchestra starts to play, she opens her mouth and a song she has sung countless times restores her to life as it flows through her.
Flows through her and then out into the auditorium with the intensity of a cyclotron beam; anyone who has known Piaf's voice can recognize it from a single syllable. The film sees her passion as the product of a wretched, sickly childhood -- abandoned by her alcoholic parents, raised by her grandmother among prostitutes in a brothel. From the age of nine she sang songs for sous on the streets of Paris. (When little Edith lets loose with "La Marseillaise" it's enough to send bourgeois passersby to the barricades.) As a young woman she had unerring taste in music and disastrous taste in men. At the age of 44, wracked by illness and addiction, she looked like a harridan. Before turning 48 she was dead.
"La Vie en Rose," photographed superbly by Tetsuo Nagata, honors Piaf's life by refusing to sentimentalize it. The film is long and sometimes harrowing, but also enthralling. And the script declines to bother with such events as World War II, which slips by unnoticed. It took me a while to realize this wasn't negligence, but a reflection of Piaf's point of view. Her life was only about singing, and searching for love. And, always, the songs.
For those of us (a minority, admittedly) who duck and cover at the first blast of Edith Piaf, a French music-hall Ethel Merman without Merman�s likable tackiness, the new biopic La Vie en Rose makes the case for �the little sparrow�s� overemoting: She learned to sing in public by singing for her supper. Olivier Dahan�s film depicts Piaf as an eternal abandoned waif�raised in a brothel, a circus with mean clowns, and on the streets, a performing monkey for a dissolute father and then a brutal pimp. Even sloppy drunk (often), even scared senseless, she was loud, urgent, and on key. (It�s not easy to blast on key, as viewers of American Idol can attest.) We like her even at her most shrewish, as a gamine terrible, because we see the hell she came from and�since this is one of those back-and-forth-in-time biopics�the hell in which she�ll end her days.
Dahan uses Piaf�s song �La Vie en Rose��basically, a life in clover�ironically, and it turns up as an instrumental, too. You can�t get away from it. The tone is established early on when her father, home from the war, plucks 5-year-old Edith from under filthy sheets in her drunken mother�s home and dumps her at the whorehouse of her icy grandmother. Just when Edith forms a primal bond with a maternal prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner), her father reclaims her; the girl weeps, and Titine shrieks she�s going to kill herself. It�s ghastly, heartrending, and, as it turns out, fake�there was no Titine. But then, all biopics take liberties. The motif, in any case, is separation and loss. Nearly everyone of real significance in Piaf�s short life dies, gets killed, is carted off, or isn�t in the movie. There�s also a buried trauma that�s unearthed in the end that has you going, �Huh?� Pascal Greggory plays Louis Barrier, the mentor who bullied Piaf into dredging up all those febrile emotions in her singing. So he�s to blame.
La Vie en Rose has some peculiar ellipses. For example, the murder of her first patron (G�rard Depardieu, bestowing his eminence on Edith and the film) comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. The movie also leaps from 1940 to 1947, omitting the small episode of Germany�s occupation of France at the height of Piaf�s stardom. She was quite the heroine to the Resistance, but either the film was hacked down or the episode didn�t fit in with Dahan�s view of Piaf as a basket case.
Virtually all showbiz biopics have lapses and groaners, but as Jamie Foxx, Joaquin Phoenix, Sissy Spacek, and almost everyone except Kevin Spacey can affirm, they pay off in awards for actors willing to hurl themselves into the volcano. Marion Cotillard is a hurler. She�s prettier than Piaf, with round eyes that take up half her face, but she doesn�t get by on her looks. She knows you can�t play Piaf halfway. As the diva in her prime, she still gives you glimpses of the child famished for connection. Dahan devises a tour de force shot in which she rushes around her apartment, in and out of fantasy, as news of the fate of her prizefighting lover (Jean-Pierre Martins) sinks in. In Piaf�s old age (actually her mid-forties, but she looks 80), she lurches forward, a hunchback with stick arms, those eyes burning with incomprehension. She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf�s songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she�s Piaf overacting like mad�the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.
As if acknowledging the challenges it faces in finding an American audience, �La Vie en Rose,� Olivier Dahan�s long, feverish film biography of �dith Piaf, notes that its heroine, an incomparably bright star in the French cultural firmament, never quite caught on over here. After a less than rapturous stateside reception, the film�s Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) observes that Americans just don�t get her, and though she seems to have a good time in New York and California, the incomprehension appears to have been mutual. She won�t even try a corned beef sandwich at a Manhattan delicatessen.
But Mr. Dahan�s film goes some way toward bridging the gap. This is not because it explains Piaf�s appeal � though it does offer viewers a chance to sample the glories of her voice � but rather because it assimilates her life neatly into the conventions of the musical biopic. It turns out that we Americans don�t have a monopoly on singers and composers who emerge from traumatic childhoods, battle drug addiction, pursue difficult love affairs and win the hearts of millions. It also turns out that, while musical idioms sometimes have a hard time crossing the barriers of language and culture, certain narrative clich�s are universal.
So if you have seen �Ray� or �Walk the Line,� you will hardly require a summary of �La Vie en Rose,� which flings its subject back and forth in time, simultaneously charting her rise from the tough streets of Paris and her decline into drug abuse and ill health. There are tearful confrontations, moments of bliss and betrayal, tantrums and onstage collapses, love affairs and business deals, all of it punctuated by the big, expressive, unmistakable singing of Piaf herself, as Ms. Cotillard, wide-eyed and fine-boned, lip-syncs along.
The celebrity biopic is decidedly an actor�s genre. The number of great movies made out of great artists� lives is tiny, especially in proportion to the number of supposedly great performances these movies have occasioned. In this kind of picture the story, the production design and the mise-en-sc�ne need only provide adequate scaffolding for a heroically superfluous act of impersonation.
No one else could possibly be �dith Piaf, or Johnny Cash or Ray Charles (or Truman Capote or Muhammad Ali or anyone else on the ever-growing list). Their larger-than-life self-sufficiency adds a thrilling element of risk to the task of portraying any of them on film. Or so it would seem. Really, though, the audacity involved in taking up such a challenge predisposes audiences (and critics) to applause, as does the durable popularity of the originals. So it is hard not to admire Ms. Cotillard for the discipline and ferocity she brings to the role. But it is equally hard to be completely swept up in Mr. Dahan�s dutiful, functional and ultimately superficial film.
�La Vie en Rose,� which Mr. Dahan wrote as well as directed, has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it�s a complete mess. Resisting the habit of starting at the end and flashing back to the beginning, it begins at the late middle, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the near-end, jumps around in the early and middle middle and then noodles around between a bunch of almost-ends and the really absolutely final end, with a quick, baffling detour into an earlier part of the early middle. Clear enough?
The main casualty of this willy-nilly narration is any coherent sense of Piaf�s personality. It may be that Mr. Dahan and his collaborators did not want to subject their heroine to the indignity of psychological explanation, preferring to let her charisma rule the screen without qualification or compromise. And it is true that Ms. Cotillard is a dynamic, quick-witted performer, one whose sheer force of will goes some way toward showing how a funny-looking, abrasive street urchin could become the idol of postwar France.
But not quite far enough. Who was Piaf? The miserable childhood, with its saving moments of tenderness, is duly noted. Papa was a circus contortionist, Mama was a hopeless drunk, and little �dith lived for a while in Grandma�s brothel, where she was befriended by a soulful prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) and where she was briefly blinded by keratitis. Later �dith and her best pal, Momone (Sylvie Testud), sing on the streets of Paris � actually Momone makes faces and swigs wine while �dith belts out the songs � where �dith is discovered by a nightclub impresario (G�rard Depardieu).
He gives her a stage name. (Piaf means �sparrow.�) She is a hit. He is murdered. She is a suspect. What really happened? We don�t know, but in any case she soon moves on to a new mentor, and then to a love affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Also at least one marriage, several car accidents and one brilliantly shot sequence, by far the best in the movie, in which she learns of a lover�s death.
To help us sort though it all, dates appear at the bottom of the screen. Oddly, the years of the Second World War are left out, an omission that seems puzzling given that Piaf is known to have aided the Resistance during the Nazi occupation (even as she continued to perform). But many of Mr. Dahan�s dramatic choices are puzzling, and his breathless camera movements seem driven more by desperation than by enthusiasm.
In the end, as often happens in movies of this kind, �La Vie en Rose� is saved by Piaf herself. Most of the songs in the film are accompanied by subtitles. (An exception is �Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,� the signature of her last years.) They are hardly necessary, given the undiminished power of that voice. Unfortunately the movie isn�t either.
Not too far into "La Vie en Rose ," Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard ) enters a big New York recording studio and stands under a microphone. Her mouth opens and out flies a song. But it's not the language in the tune you seize on. It's the language of her body. The woman stands with her legs apart and her hands on her hips. The face -- oh, that face and its pallid skin, red lips, penciled eyebrows, and unruly pageboy; she looks like Louise Brooks' ghostly sister. Her face is a defiant, aching mask. The year is 1959, four years before Piaf's death from cancer, and her expression suggests that there's an endless supply of ache-inducing material.
If even half of Olivier Dahan's robust film about Piaf's life is true -- and let's face it, much remains shrouded in myth and mystery -- it's a wonder she could get dressed in the morning, let alone forge a legendary singing career. But the movie exuberantly argues that her emotional aches and pains sustained her while the physical ones did her in. Her triumph was not simply over poverty, bad genes, and worse health. It was over a fickle cosmos, too. Good luck came with a whole lot of bad.
In this movie's version of her life, Edith is abandoned by her mother, dumped at her granny's brothel, raised by prostitutes, separated from the hooker who painted little Edith's face like a clown but loved her like a doll, and reunited with her abusive acrobat father. Young Edith goes blind until her sight is miraculously restored. She goes hungry until the club owner Louis Lepl�e (Gerard Depardieu ) discovers her busking on the Paris streets. He changes her name from Edith Giovanna Gassion to Edith Piaf and launches her career. But when he's found dead, she's momentarily fingered as a suspect in the murder. Nary a word is mentioned of Piaf's contributions to the French Resistance. Not tragic enough perhaps. In lieu of revolution, the woman is slapped, dragged, shouted at, nearly killed in a car crash, dependent on morphine, and spectacularly alcoholic. She loses friends, including her butch buddy Momone , who's played by the wonderfully feline Sylvie Testud. But Piaf never wanted the show to stop. She loses family. And this is just a partial list.
"La Vie en Rose" comes wrapped in standard biopic packaging. It traces Piaf's difficult rise from snot-nosed urchin to international superstar to palsied, prematurely aged invalid, complete with the obligatory star-conquers-world montage that includes close-ups of newspaper articles and copies of Match magazine flying off the presses. But the movie also spins like a wheel of misfortune around her life with dizzying, almost impressionistic style.
Even when the film stops oscillating to show Edith's blissful affair with the European middleweight Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins ), we suspect that bad news can't be too far off. They were both at the top of their careers, and in 1983's bauble, "Edith et Marcel ," Claude Lelouch turned the lovers into one of his usual advertisements for having it all.
Dahan uses the relationship to bring a moment of sanity to the film. Their amour wasn't fou. It was stabilizing for her, the only calm she would ever really know. But her unraveling after its terrible demise produces the movie's most ingeniously conceived piece of directing and production design, wherein Edith's private agony seamlessly becomes a public spectacle. Better than almost any film about an entertainer I've seen, "La Vie en Rose" uses perceptive filmmaking, as opposed to turgid exposition, to explain its subject's psyche and to cleverly capture the spell she cast over audiences.
Cotillard is spellbinding in her own right. Whether she's bounding mannishly up a flight of stairs, learning how to sing in harmony with her body, shuffling, stooped and slow, into a room, or belting out a song completely drunk, she turns Piaf into an intensely physical creature. But there is also incontrovertible sadness in her performance that gives the movie as much tortured soul as Jamie Foxx brought to "Ray " and as much melancholy as Joaquin Phoenix brought to "Walk the Line ." Sometimes even when the character is happy, Cotillard, who's only 31, keeps the singer's face -- at 20, at 47 -- etched in the mask of tragedy.
It's Piaf she's playing, it's true. but you wouldn't be mistaken for detecting in Cotillard's rendition generous helpings of Judy Garland and Billie Holiday , women whose titanic talent was at war with their titanic unhappiness. Piaf was similar but on a smaller, less self-destructive scale. By comparison, she's an optimist. When, she shuffles out in front of a packed concert hall to debut "No, je ne regrette rien " three years before her death, you know she means it. She's singing her own "My Way."
The great French singer Edith Piaf, who died at 47 in 1963, gets the biopic treatment in "La Vie En Rose." Cross-cutting back and forth across the decades, writer-director Olivier Dahan takes in practically her entire life. However painful that life might have been for Piaf, it's almost criminally suited to the movies.
It's all here � heartbreak, passion, murder, acclaim, abandonment. Although Piaf's life has its legendary side, there was apparently no need to embellish the record. If anything, Duhan had to pare down the events.
Raised in her grandmother's brothel in Normandy, Piaf, who was born Edith Giovanna Gassion, was nearly blind and deaf as a child, due to illness. At 14 she joined her father as an acrobatic singing street performer and in 1935 was discovered by nightclub owner Louis Leplee (G�rard Depardieu), who nicknamed her La M�me Piaf (The Little Sparrow). Subsequently she was accused, and acquitted of, abetting in his murder.
By 1940 Piaf was the toast of Paris, celebrated by stars such as Jean Cocteau, Marlene Dietrich, and Charlie Chaplin. After the war her fame became international. The love of her life, middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), was killed in a plane crash in 1949 while on his way to visit her. A car accident two years later left her addicted to morphine.
This is just a sampling of Piaf's bio. Is it any wonder that her signature song was "Non, je ne regrette rien"? Her fortitude had no room for regrets. Like Billie Holiday, to whom she is often compared, Piaf was a singer whose heartache is palpably present in every quaver of her voice. (All but four of the songs in the film are from original recordings; the others are sung by Jil Aigrot and Maya Barsony.) Equating an artist's life with her art is often a dubious dramatic ploy, but it makes sense in the overlong "La Vie En Rose" because the content of Piaf's life and the power of her singing are all of a piece.
Although he's not as boorish about it as his Hollywood counterparts, Duhan indulges the old biopic clich� that art comes out of suffering. In the case of Piaf, who is played by Marion Cotillard, this notion is not entirely irrelevant but, more often, what we actually see is a woman for whom suffering was an impediment to art (as it also was for Holiday, or, for that matter, Judy Garland).
Duhan's criss-crossed time structure reinforces the idea that Piaf's life was fated to end badly. Long before the end we see brief scenes of the dying chanteuse.
What seems more integral to Piaf's art than suffering, however, was her intense fear of loneliness, and this Cotillard conveys powerfully. For Piaf, to be out of the spotlight was to be nonexistent. When she sings for her audiences in "La Vie en Rose," she seeks a connection so intense it can never be undone. Although she could be disparaging about her gifts, Piaf exhibited herself, and was experienced by her fans, as the archetype of the self-immolating artist.
"La Vie en Rose" elevates Piaf the archetype over Piaf the artist. Although I question this approach, I'm not sure it could have been done any differently, at least given the facts of Piaf's life. If there is such a way, Duhan didn't find it.
Olivier Dahan's sprawling portrait of the life of Edith Piaf is the kind of grand, passionate historical drama that no one seems to be able to pull off any more. Dahan does so magnificently, thanks largely to a brilliant performance by Marion Cotillard.
Discovered singing on a Belleville street corner by a nightclub owner (a quick star turn by Gerard Depardieu) who nicknamed her "La M�me Piaf" (the Little Sparrow), Piaf rose from the gutter and gangster culture to nightclubs and finally concert halls to become a French songstress legend and cultural icon.
Cotillard plays the legend from 20-year-old street singer and hard-living urchin to superstar concert-hall vocalist to frail icon, bent and palsied from a life of drink, drugs and high living without ever losing the spark of the sassy street kid who muscled her way into polite company. Even when planted in front of a microphone, she stands aggressive and defiant, as if holding her ground and staring down the audience while belting out her stories.
The sprawling historical epic slips back and forth through her life, leaping from traumatic moments to quiet reveries with little apparent pattern. It tends to confuse her timeline, which already skips over her legendary work with the French Resistance during the German occupation. It's really less a biography than the sketch of a melodramatic life of triumphs and tragedies and a passionate woman who favored emotion and impulse over reason and restraint.
But no, she has no regrets, or so goes her signature song and lyric epitaph. While Dahan's take on her final moments may contradict the defiant lyrics of that song, Cotillard convinces that Piaf lived by that romantic and heedless philosophy.
Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman. It's not hard to do, given the fuzzy borders between Piaf's undeniably scarred life and her relentless gift for revisionist autobiography. By any measure, France's favorite songbird had a lousy childhood. Shuttled from pillar to post of Paris's slum district by her mother, an alcoholic caf� singer and part-time hooker, Piaf was eventually dumped as a toddler by her father (a circus contortionist) on his mother, who ran a brothel. This serial abandonment led to a self-destructive streak that dogged Piaf through her years singing for scraps on the streets. A meteoric rise to fame did nothing to ease the existential panic, and Piaf spent years as a soused party animal with scads of unreliable lovers who made her miserable and vice versa. Two tumultuous marriages didn't help, nor did Piaf's addiction to morphine after a serious car crash. Dragging herself from one performance to another long after she should have quit, at age 47 she finally succumbed, defiantly but famously with no regrets, to cancer in 1963. If that's not a movie, I don't know what is.
Piaf was a brawling mess who parlayed the pain she wore on her sleeve into a glittering career as France's heartbreak balladeer. To this day her gravel voice thrills me, but she was also a rabid self-mythologizer who liked to play up her childhood travails. An unblushing fan, writer-director Olivier Dahan has bought the package and added a myth or two of his own, cooking up a fictional warm-hearted tart (Emmanuelle Seigner) who nurses little orphan Edith through a period of temporary blindness (unconfirmed) and drums up sufficient funds to dispatch the child on a pilgrimage, where Saint Theresa provides a miracle cure that Dahan hands us without so much as a cocked eyebrow.
La Vie En Rose trudges dutifully from one costumed "defining" event to the next, building to a kind of Piaf theme park that plays out like a bad parody of Dickens or Balzac. Slack-jawed proles wearing artistically grimy faces drop everything to gawk as the tiny waif belts out "The Marseillaise" on a street corner, followed by copious shots of rapt and bejeweled audiences in Paris's cavernous Olympia Hall as Piaf finds the voice and the style that seal her phenomenal success.
Quite aside from her towering vocal range and forcefulness as a populist interpreter of the French chanson, Piaf was an instinctive social leveler (she hobnobbed with Cocteau, but the love of her life was a married middleweight boxer and pig farmer) who became a unifying romantic voice for war-torn France. But there remains the murkier and still unresolved question of whether Piaf, along with her pal Maurice Chevalier, was a collaborator who happily performed for Nazi military bigwigs during the Occupation, or a clandestine protector of the French Resistance. Reluctant to muddy his diva with complication, Dahan sticks with neurosis, focusing in on the often yawning chasm between the terrified child and the grandstanding diva.
Cotillard doesn't do her own singing�who, after all, could replicate the soaring rasp that burst fully formed out of that tiny body? In a sense, every scene in La Vie En Rose is a holding pattern for the next ballad, which would reduce the movie to a musical were it not for Cotillard's command of character. Though she's far prettier than Piaf at any age and has to be heavily made up to come close to the bug-eyed jolie-laide that was la M�me, Cotillard not only has her fluttery mannerisms down, but the fragile sense of self that kept her always on the edge. With shoulders hunched, head tipped, and hands flung forward, Cotillard gives us a Piaf stranded between the mutinous child she never fully outgrew and the crowd-pleasing supplicant who could never get enough audience love. If Piaf was an empty shell, she knew how to put on a show, on and off stage. Channeling the shell, the performer, and the shambles in between Cotillard raises France's poor, beloved chanteuse clean out of mundane pathos, into the ruined grandeur she deserves.
A confession: I don't like divas. I especially loathe the self-destructive variety � the kind that sentimentally impressionable people are always writing books and making movies about. You know who I'm talking about � the pill-poppers, the drunks, the would-be suicides, all those Judys and Marilyns and Janis Joplins who emerge from their troubled childhoods into careers which revolve largely around making audiences wonder whether they'll actually show up for their performances. And if they do, whether they'll give something other than a pathetic play for our sympathies � which often enough involves our forgiving a sadly diminished voice or presence.
This behavior is more than tiresome, because there is no reason to believe there's a real link between their troubles and their talents. An off-stage battle with booze or drugs doesn't necessarily add depth or soul to their performances. On the contrary, the history of show business is replete with sad stories that are redeemed by disciplined hard work. Plenty of stars refuse to trade on their hard-knock lives; they entertain us, not by forcing us to wallow in their miseries, but by causing us to forget our own for an hour or two.
These reflections are occasioned by the arrival from France of La Vie En Rose, a biopic about the gifted, fragile and intermittently insane chanteuse Edith Piaf. Writer-director Olivier Dahan, has given her story a sumptuous production � with the look of an old-fashioned Hollywood musical sob story � as well as a maddeningly fragmented structure. For reasons best known to Dahan, he is always cutting from Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) at the height of her relatively brief life (she was discovered in 1935 and died, at age 47, in 1963) to this or that aspect of her dismal past � her desertion by her mad mother, the years she spent in her grandmother's brothel (no, she was never a working girl, though that seems to be the only indignity she was spared), her time as a street singer, her rise to drug and drink addled international fame, her inevitable decline and early death from cancer. Considerable attention is paid to the great love of her life, Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), the middleweight boxing champion, who died in airplane crash at the height of his fame and their love affair.
But there is no rhyme or reason to this jumble � except perhaps to stress Edith's endless self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story. I guess Dahan thinks it really only has one point � her misery � and that it doesn't make much difference what order he presents it. Cotillard appears to be as tiny as Piaf was (the singer was only 4' 8") and she acts neurasthenic as all get out, but somehow her constantly victimized state works against our sympathetic response, particularly since the film's random structure often robs us of cause-effect connections. Sometime an inner voice threatens to burst forth: "C'mon Edie, pull up your socks."
That pretty much leaves us with Cerdan, radiating good nature and a casual pleasure in his own celebrity, to make us feel good for a few moments, and with Piaf's uncanny voice, still thrilling, still moving in her classic songs. It's easy to make us believe that her sad life conditioned the rueful timbre she imparts to her music. Maybe too easy. It's possible that her natural vocal quality was the one lucky accident in her unlucky life. Which, considering the fame, money and sympathetic regard she collected was not � considered from an objective viewpoint � all that unfortunate.
All right, John Hard Heart has had his say. Maybe you will boo-hoo straight through this simple-minded, cheaply sentimental and unrelievedly lugubrious movie. Me, I made it to the long-delayed ending by shutting my eyes and ears to its dramatic passages and pretending it was a concert film. Sometimes my straying mind settled on the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day, who must surely have had their troubles, but refused to wear them on their sleeves or on their bravely scatting tongues.