- If you're not a member why not Start a FREE trial
- Already a member? Sign in here
- Get our newsletter
- Help
|
La Vie en Rose
The great French singer Edith Piaf was physically small (4 feet eight inches), working class, and grew up in her grandmother's whorehouse. Her career started out on the street corners of Paris, singing for centimes. Even when she came under the wing of her first manager she brought trouble along with her. He was murdered and Edith was tainted by the scandal. Yet 'la mome' went on to become a beloved cultural treasure, the pride and joy of France. I'm not sure Britain has anyone to compare. Maybe Vera Lynn comes closest, but she can't compete artistically. Piaf's tremulous yet gritty, passionately dramatic voice is unique; someone said she's like Billie Holiday, Judy Garland and Janis Joplin rolled into one. It's surprising there haven't been more films about her. Claude Lelouch focused on her romance with the French boxer Marcel Cerdan in Edith and Marcel (1983), and there was a homegrown effort in the early 1970s, but that's about it. Olivier Dehan's film is an old-fashioned sampling menu of a biopic cut from the same cloth as Ray and Walk The Line. It starts in New York in 1959, with Piaf collapsing on stage, then cuts back to WWI and that childhood in the school of hard knocks; forward again to the 50s; back to the early showbiz breaks; and so forth. 
This tried and tested approach is serviceable enough, though rarely inspired. After 140 minutes you come out with (what seems like, at any rate) a pretty solid grounding in Piaf, her life and times - with one significant exception, which, in homage to Dehan's fractured structure, I will come to later. On the other hand the film's overly ambitious a la carte five-decade span doesn't allow many sequences time to develop any subtlety or flavour, and the further back it goes in period, the less 'lived in' it feels. Gerard Depardieu comes and goes in the blink of an eye. There's an interesting episode in which the flighty 'little sparrow' is put through her hoops by an agent who insists she learn diction and performance, but her personal life is a chaotic carousel of interchangeable hoods, patrons and boozy broads, and Piaf herself often gets lost in the blur. Dehan - like Lelouch before him - places most of his eggs in the relationship with Cerdan (played by Jean Pierre Martins), whom she meets in New York after WWII. The boxer is, I think, generally forgotten outside France, but at the time he and Piaf met as equals, and their affair was the love of her life. This is the one episode when Dehan truly rises to the occasion. It's only gradually, as the two story-frames (the ailing chanteuse of the 50s and the rising music hall artiste of the 30s) draw nearer that you realize how rapidly Edith's health collapsed. 
This is potentially a career-defining role for any actress, and Marion Cotillard is quite remarkable - and totally unrecognizable from the Provencal honey in Ridley Scott's A Good Year. It may seem a strange thing to say about a singer, but with her waif-like figure, pale face and pencil thin eyebrows over big, round eyes, Piaf resembles nothing so much as a silent movie actress, a resemblance mirrored in her stage gestures, which entreat and beseech in the manner of Lillian Gish or Gloria Swanson. When Cotillard performs the songs (ie lip-synchs them), which is not often enough, whatever reservations you might have about the jumbled storytelling evaporate and the movie no longer has to justify itself to anyone. This was a woman who poured everything she had into her art until she had nothing more to give. The film's one gaping hole is WWII - by most accounts an important period in Piaf's life and indeed for the rest of us. Dehan takes us to the very outbreak of war and then skips over it as if it were an irrelevance (or possibly an embarrassment). From what I understand Piaf continued her career, proved popular with the German officers and dated one. But she is also said to have aided the Resistance. Maybe Monsieur Dehan has plans for a sequel? Tom Charity 
More information about La Vie en Rose » Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
