Edith Piaf.
It is the name of a singer known throughout France, though she died nearly 40 years ago. With ‘La Vie En Rose,’ the rest of the world is coming to know her name and her phenomenal repertoire, just a few notes of which are enough to raise the hair on one’s arms.
Having only seen her performance in Ridley Scott’s pleasant but forgettable ‘A Good Year,’ I was blown away by Marion Cotillard’s ability to completely subsume herself in the role of the Parisian ‘sparrow’ (‘piaf’ is Parisian slang for sparrow). Appropriating Piaf’s bent posture and painted-on eyebrows, as well as her fast barking talk, Cotillard truly became the French diva.
The film eschews chronological biopic clich’eacute; of the sort that ‘Walk The Line’ indulged in too much, and no attempt was made to have Cotillard sing the songs that Piaf made her own with her unforgettable, gravelly voice.
Instead, the film unflinchingly depicts the sparkling highs and harrowing lows of Piaf’s tragically short life. Though there are moments that are inevitable to telling the story of an internationally-known singer-the ‘discovery,’ the ‘mentorship,’ the first successful performance, the drug addictions and attempts at rehabilitation — ‘La Vie en Rose’ manages to avoid most of the pitfalls, leaping across time from the beginning of her life to the end and back.
The audience is left to put together the pieces of her life, rather than having it force-fed, from her early childhood blindness, to her collapsing on stage after years of morphine addiction and various car accidents ravaged her body; from her first time singing on the street for money to her luxurious affair with boxer Marcel Cerdan; from one of her last interviews on the beach in California to the moment she first heard a composer audition ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ (‘No Regrets’) for her, which would become one of her biggest hits.
At the end, the film makes an effort to make the audience understand that no life can be fully captured on the screen. While Piaf is on her deathbed, thinking over her life, unlike other biopics, the audience does not see scenes that they would usually be familiar with.
Instead, the audience sees new scenes, learns new things about Piaf’s tragic life, and realizes that no biopic is ever truly ‘complete.’ The best it can do is give us a sense, an inkling of the complexity of anyone’s life, much less the life of someone as well-known and yet as mysterious as Edith Piaf.
With beautiful period costumes from the 1930s, 1940s. and 1950s; superb performances by Cotillard, Gerard Depardieu (as the man who ‘discovers’ the Sparrow on the streets of Paris) and the rest of the supporting cast; magnificent views of Paris and New York; as well as a tight screenplay that, even in translation, never indulges in clich’eacute; or triteness, ‘La Vie en Rose’ is a magnificent film and nothing less than a beautiful ode to one of the legends of the twentieth century.
