La Vie en Rose: A Review

 

LA VIE EN ROSE

In the history of the Academy Awards, only two women have won the Best Actress Oscar for non-English films. The first is Sophia Loren for the Italian film Two Women. The second is Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose, the French biopic of chanteuse Edith Piaf. I have high praise for Loren, who transcended her beauty to reveal a brilliant, heartbreaking performance.

I truly wish I could say the same for Cottillard, but I cannot. In both the performance and the film, La Vie en Rose did not make a case on why the Little Sparrow was worth following for almost two and a half hours. 

La Vie en Rose jumps from the final days of Edith Piaf (Cotillard) to her early days and her rise (and various stage falls) to become the definitive French singer. Piaf, born Edith Gassion, lives in grinding poverty at the end of World War I. Her trampish, destitute mother sings on the shabby streets of Paris. Edith's father, currently fighting in the war, takes his little girl to Normandie, where she is looked after by his mother, who happens to be the madam of a brothel.

As a side note, I think this is the same background as comedian Richard Pryor, but I digress.

Edith becomes the pet of the whores, in particular Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner). Titine cares for Edith when Edith temporarily goes blind and later recovers, thanks in part to their devotion to Saint Therese, which Edith carries for the rest of her life.

Life is hardscrabble for Edith, who sings on street corners for change. Her life takes a turn when cabaret impresario Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) spots her and builds her into Edith Piaf. She seems on her way until Leplee is murdered by gangsters. Owing to her past association with gangsters, she is suspected of being an accessory but has no involvement. With her career threatened, she turns to songwriter and voice coach Raymond Asso (Marc Barbe) for help. Asso pushes Piaf not just vocally but physically, training her in diction and body movement, convinced that she could be la plus grande chanteuse dans toute la France.

In between her musical triumphs, Piaf has an ill-fated love affair with boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), gets hooked on heroin, goes through rehab, meets Marlene Dietrich (Caroline Silhol), who astonishes her by telling her how Piaf's singing evokes Paris to her, and then lives out her last day.

I am sure that there are people who, when they think of Edith Piaf, they will recall how she was called "that crazy Mexican lady" in Bull Durham. La Vie en Rose serves to clarify that she is not Mexican but French. Apart from that, I found it a slog, wishing that this thing would end.

As we go through Piaf's life hither and yon, I can understand how director Olivier Dahan (who cowrote the screenplay with Isabelle Sobelman) wanted to get away from the standard biopic treatment. There are usually two ways to make a biopic: a birth-to-death coverage of someone's life or a specific time period that covers a major turning point in the subject's life. Better Man is something like the former, Hitchcock is something like the latter. La Vie en Rose seems to want it both ways: cover the entirety of Piaf's sadly brief life while hitting on major turning points (her discovery by Leplee, her affair with Cerdan, her final day). I think that in retrospect, it might have been better for La Vie en Rose if it had opted for one of those methods rather than try to go halfway one route, halfway another.

I might have been dozing off at certain points, but I think that the structure in La Vie en Rose sometimes obscured who some of the people Piaf interacted with were. There is the character of Doug Davis (Harry Hadden-Paton), who I gathered was Piaf's American boy-toy whom she ended up getting killed when, on almost a whim, she ordered him to drive her to see her childhood home during a heavy rainstorm. Who is Doug? Why is his death basically unimportant? 

I am not well-versed in Piaf's life, but from what I saw in La Vie en Rose, as an adult she always looked disheveled and inches from falling, be it the gutter or on the stage. The film starts with her giving a concert in New York, where the ambulance is ready for when she collapses. Near the end, she jokes that people have come to see her fall and she hasn't yet. Unsurprisingly, she does shortly afterwards. It is to where I wondered if her collapses from emotional or physical exhaustion were there for show. 

In terms of performances, I was not won over by the Gallic charms of Marion Cotillard. She is a fine actress who has appeared in American films such as Inception and The Dark Knight Rises. I found her performances overwrought even if it was Edith Piaf, a woman forever falling apart. I saw Cottillard make a lot of faces, keeping her head titled almost always on one side. I, however, did not see Edith Piaf. I saw an almost cartoonish parody, exaggerated and almost hysterical in every sense of the word. While I will concede that losing your lover unexpectedly in a plane crash would leave one distraught, Cotillard's performance here did not touch me or move me. It was all that I could do to stop myself from howling with laughter at how almost operatic she was.

I will say that this section did have one good moment when in her grief and mad running through the hotel, the transition to her performing Hymne a L'Amour was good. I also thought it was good of the film to include Piaf singing in English, particularly the title song, which I think more people know because of Louis Armstrong's cover.

Cotillard is the show, but I found it almost unhinged to where I wondered that Piaf could not have been that overwrought and at times downright loony. Depardieu did well as her first mentor, and Barbe did as well as the stricter Henry Higgins like Asso. The Cerdan-Piaf romance worked well too, thanks to Martins. Here, Cotillard came across as more human rather than the slightly crazed woman about to literally fall apart in front of everyone. 

I was not won over by La Vie en Rose. I thought it gave me no insight into the Little Sparrow. I will say that while I think it deserved its Best Makeup Oscar win, I wonder how weak that year's field was to have Cotillard's mugging win Best Actress. 

Many people think La Vie en Rose is great. I do not. What would I say to those who think highly of La Vie en Rose and think that I am wrong? Non, je ne regrette rien...

1915-1963

DECISION: D+

Wonder Woman (1974): The Television Movie

WONDER WOMAN: THE TELEVISION MOVIE

Film and television adaptations of Wonder Woman have been hit-and-miss. The 2017 film was successful critically and commercially. The 2020 sequel, however, was neither. On television, the 1975-1979 Lynda Carter series and its theme are still fondly remembered. The 2011 attempted reboot on the other hand was such a disaster that not only was it not picked up for series, but the pilot was also never aired. In the various attempted and realized adaptations, people forget that the year before Carter donned her satin tights, another Wonder Woman television series was planned. Wonder Woman is such a bizarre project that one should watch it only to marvel at how anyone in front or behind the camera thought that any of it was good. 

A television movie meant as a test pilot, Wonder Woman stars Cathy Lee Crosby as Diana Prince. She is an Amazonian who has made the great sacrifice to leave Paradise Island to go to the world of men, where there is evil at work. A notorious master criminal named Abner Smith has uncovered the identity of thirty-nine covert agents and will sell them to the highest bidder, putting all of them at risk. He will give the names back to the U.S. for $15 million, with them having three days to meet his ransom. While head spook Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas) has various men working on the case, he needs his secretary Diana Prince to go to France for a "dental appointment".

Once there, everyone knows that she is super-spy Wonder Woman. That includes Abner Smith's chief henchman George (Andrew Prine), who has both murderous and erotic designs on our heroine. She thwarts these assassination attempts with surprising agility and intelligence. No number of hired assassins or snakes sent to her various hotel rooms will stop Diana from pursuing Abner Smith. 

The ransom is agreed to be paid, as time is running short. It is an attempted trap to get Abner Smith to finally reveal himself, which he gladly does so when he captures Wonder Woman. The notorious Abner Smith (Ricardo Montalban) is charming and elegant. He also does not want Diana killed. George, already bitter that he has been rebuffed, chafes at the directive. However, George has an ace up his sleeve: renegade Amazonian Anhjayla (Anitra Ford), who has joined forces with George. Has Wonder Woman met her match? Will Abner Smith get away? 

The curious thing about Wonder Woman is, that apart from her origins on Paradise Island, there is absolutely nothing special or powerful about Diana Prince. Screenwriter John D.F. Black and director Vincent McEveety failed on every level to make Wonder Woman interesting. They decided that Diana had no great powers. Instead, she was in many ways almost ordinary. Moreover, a lot of Wonder Woman makes no sense.

Everyone working for Abner Smith knows who WW is, yet no one at the agency did. The various efforts to assassinate Diana range from bizarre to downright laughable. A group of men in one scene enter a moving elevator from above, and she is able to defeat them so easily that one thinks the scene is pretty pointless. Another time, a snake is sent to her hotel room. I will not diminish the threat of a potentially venomous snake. I will, however, question why Wonder Woman would open a box sent to her room so casually. I also have doubts on whether or not you can remove this threat by having Room Service send over a dish of milk.

I will also question why Abner Smith did not simply kill her when she goes into an obvious trap at a rented mansion. Is it even worth bothering at this point to wonder why "Abner Smith" seems such a ludicrous name for a master criminal? I wonder if George ever called him "Lil' Abner" behind his back.

Perhaps I can begrudgingly say that there is one semi-good moment of wit. When George and Diana are having dinner, George openly says, "Let me make love to you". Diana asks why. After pointing out his own virtues, Diana replies, "You misunderstood me. I didn't mean why should you want to. I meant why should I?". 

However, in all other respects Wonder Woman is oddball. Apparently, Abner Smith's plan was to kill Wonder Woman by trapping her in a sealed room and sending multicolored lava to smother her. This is after she has to follow a burro to find Abner Smith's hideout. A burro that Abner Smith sent Steve Trevor. A burro who is released with the ransom money by using the words, "Corras rapido, por favor", which translates from Spanish as, "Run fast, please". 

We never get an explanation as to who Anhjayla is, or how she managed to hook up with George (interpret that any way that you wish). She and Diana have a battle of javelins that essentially ends in a draw. "You know as well as I do that we will face each other again", Anhjayla tells her frenemy. I figure that was a tease for the hoped-for television series. We will never see this promised confrontation.

All the better, as Wonder Woman has some woeful acting. For most of Wonder Woman, Ricardo Montalban is deliberately kept off screen, with only his hands and voice to appear on camera. He's hamming it up for all its worth, delighting in the chance to be cartoonish. He was, I think, fully aware that Wonder Woman was not a pilot for a series but camp, silly and illogical. Pity that no one else got the memo. 

Former tennis pro Cathy Lee Crosby, I think, did the best that she could with the material. However, there was very little to show that she could have carried a full series. She as at times blank and wooden as Diana Prince. Fortunately for her, she recovered from this error when she later cohosted the television docuseries That's Incredible! but here she could not communicate much. Again, to be fair, Black's script and McEveety's directing were not helpful. 

Everyone else save Montalban gave a bad performance. Garas' Steve had little to do. Jordan Rhodes, who played the smitten agent Bob, was in one scene and added nothing to even a tease for a future romance or at least comic flirtation. Andrew Prine as George was done in not just by his overall bad performance. George is also a rather repulsive man. I get that as a male chauvinist pig he was meant as the opposite of Diana's enlightened woman. However, he was lousy no matter whom he interacted with. Anitra Ford's Anhjayla, like Crosby, I think tried to make this seem interesting. 

I think Wonder Woman, if seen at all, will be as a curiosity, a reflection of its time with "women's lib" becoming more dominant. This is not a good version of the superheroine, and it is good that they opted against a series which would have flopped. You've come a long way, baby, but when it comes to Wonder Woman, you had a little more way to go.

2/10

Thunderbolts*: A Review

THUNDERBOLTS*

When I think on Thunderbolts*, the newest episode of the world's longest and most expensive soap opera, I don't think "why" so much as "who". The "who" is both as in "who is this made for?" and "who are these people?". Thunderbolts* is not terrible. It just was there.

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is so tired and so bored with her job of being a hitwoman and agent to CIA director/Tulsi Gabbard lookalike Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). She wants out, or at least assignments that don't require killing and destruction. Valentina, facing impeachment for her nefarious work, agrees and has her take one last assignment: destroying a secret lab to cover up de Fontaine's nefarious work.

Ah, beware those last assignments, for this was really a trap to get all of de Fontaine's rogue agents to kill each other off. In a case of Spy vs. Spy, Yelena's intended target of John Walker/ex-Captain America 2.0 (Wyatt Russell) is there to kill Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). Ghost is there to kill Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), who is there to kill Yelena. Out of this international Mexican standoff, only Starr manages her task. Exactly how random man Bob (Lewis Pullman), who is also in the lab, fits into all this we do not know.  

De Fontaine, along with her excessively loyal aide Mel (Geraldine Viswanathan), is stunned to find that Bob is alive. He was a new experiment that managed to live, delighting de Fontaine. Not delighting her is how the other agents also live and are now on the run. Bob's powers are growing, but will de Fontaine manage to make use of them to starve off impeachment? 

Into this comes Yelena's father, Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) as well as Congressman James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan). They join forces when they see that de Fontaine will not stop until they are killed and she gains full control over Bob. Bob is now de Fontaine's newest creation, Sentry. Sentry/Bob, who has struggled for years with both self-esteem and drug addiction, now grows both more powerful and more dangerous. He has the power to plunge people into shadow, requiring the newly formed Thunderbolts (Alexei naming them as such in honor of Yelena's childhood soccer team) to enter Sentry's void to sort out his issues. Will de Fontaine manage to get away with her new plan of "the New Avengers"? What of the mysterious outer space craft that the New Avengers/Thunderbolts see on the screen in the second post-credit scene, with a Number Four prominently displayed on it?

I do not know if it is a good thing that, while watching Thunderbolts* (the asterisk apparently to signal their unofficial name versus the New Avengers moniker), I actually wanted de Fontaine's plan for them to kill each other off to work. In a sense, it did: Taskmaster was killed. However, I think by now the issue with Thunderbolts* or any upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe film is that you need to know so much of what happened before that if you don't, you will be lost. At the minimum, you won't care. I remember Yelena and Alexei from Black Widow. I've seen de Fontaine before. I have seen Bucky before (and as a side note, never liked him). 

However, Thunderbolts* really expects the audience to have an almost encyclopedia-level knowledge to know or even remember who the characters are. Ghost appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp, which was seven years ago and who hasn't to my knowledge or memory been part of the MCU since. Black Widow was four years ago. That was the first appearance of Taskmaster. She pops up and is popped so quickly in Thunderbolts* that it is a puzzle on why she was there at all. There is brief mention of events from Captain America: Brave New World, which was a mere two months ago, so I guess that is an improvement. I never saw the Disney+ show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, so this is my first introduction to John Walker. As such, I had a lot of filling in to do. 

For those complaining that Thunderbolts* is the B-Team of the MCU (and to be fair, the closing credits naming them as such was a nice touch), I would offer that the MCU is digging deep into the barrel if your antagonist is Valentina de Fontaine. Julia Louis-Dreyfus' take on the character has always been more comedic in my memory, a bit of a bumbler who tries to be some sort of master manipulator and fails at it. I do not know if Louis-Dreyfus or director Jake Schrieder actually tried to make de Fontaine a true villainess. However, when Louis-Dreyfus as de Fontaine exclaims, "Righteousness without power is just an opinion," the audience laughed. Was that intentional? 

The end result for me was that de Fontaine did not come across as a genuine threat. She came across as a smug, obnoxious twit who has inexplicable political power.

One thing that I found also inexplicable is why Thunderbolts* was edited the way that it was. The film cuts between the four-way Mexican standoff in the lab and the Washington, D.C. soiree that de Fontaine is throwing. I think that Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo's screenplay wanted us to connect the two events. I just think that the back-and-forth did not work. I also do not know how Alexei went from being a limo driver in Mother Russia to a limo driver in Washington, D.C. who conveniently overhears de Fontaine's plans for the human targets. What exactly are the odds that Alexei would be the limo driver? 

Worse is how what is meant as a tense action scene with Walker, Starr and Yelena escaping in Alexei's limo, the button that Alexei hits does not launch a missile but starts playing Ginuwine's Pony. It is enough to give MCU humor a bad name. 

Again, when Thunderbolts* wanted to be exciting and dare I say sincere, it did not work. When Sentry goes rogue and becomes Void (whom I called Shadows because that is what he looked like to me), a lot of it had me rolling my eyes. Of particular note is when the various New Avengers started saving people from Sentry/Void's purging. All I could think of was, "if these people do not have enough sense to get out of the way when objects are flying about them, they kind of deserve to be crushed". By the time we get to Void's surreal world, I was as bored as Yelena was.

I think Yelena's boredom was actually Florence Pugh's boredom with being in Thunderbolts*. I'm sure that she was well-paid for her lack of efforts. She reminded me of Madeline Kahn's performance in Blazing Saddles to where she would make for an excellent Lily Von Shtupp parody. Given that Kahn's character was meant to be a Marlene Dietrich parody, I do not know whether that is a compliment or insult for Pugh. 

Harbour was appropriately hammy as Alexei/Red Guardian. Thunderbolts* has two nepo babies: Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt and Goldie Hawn) and Lewis Pullman (son of Bill). I am not familiar with the previous work of either. I think Russell commended himself well as the obnoxious "Junior Varsity Captain America" as de Fontaine mockingly calls him. I was not impressed with Pullman, though to be fair Bob was not a particularly great character. Like another 2025 nepo baby, Pullman looks a bit too much like his father to let me fully separate them in my mind. Stan, John-Kamen and Viswanathan were fine but again, limited by the script. 

The mid-credit scene was bad (Alexei harassing a random grocery shopper to show her his face on a Wheaties box) and the post-credit scene was there to connect Thunderbolts* to the upcoming Fantastic Four: First Steps. I did not hate Thunderbolts*. However, I did wonder that with them being the New Avengers, how will that work with the Young Avengers teased in The Marvels? In the end, to my mind Thunderbolts* are not go. 

DECISION: D+

Conquest (1937): A Review (Review #1975)

CONQUEST (1937)

The saying "behind every great man is a great woman" is usually not applied to the two wives of Napoleon Bonaparte: the Empresses Josephine and Marie Louise. In fact, the phrase, "Not tonight, Josephine" is used as a byline for turning down sex. However, can that phrase be applied to one of his mistresses? Conquest is surprisingly embracing of adultery and out-of-wedlock childbirth, shocking at a time when the Hays Code was being enforced. Lavish if a bit overacted, Conquest is better to look at than to watch.

Countess Marie Waleska (Greta Garbo) is devoted to her much older husband Anastas (Henry Stephenson). She, however, loves three things: her brother Paul (Leif Erikson), Poland and the Emperor Napoleon (Charles Boyer). She sees the Emperor as a champion of the people, one who will restore an independent Polish state. Her ardor is so great that she sneaks into his camp, where Napoleon is enchanted by this beauty. As fate would have it, Anastas has arranged an audience with Napoleon at a ball, where the Emperor and the Countess begin a flirtation.

The Polish aristocrats essentially pimp Marie out for Poland, begging her to use her feminine wiles to seduce Napoleon into reestablishing Poland as an independent state. Soon, they become lovers and then they fall in love. Anastas has his marriage annulled and Napoleon divorces Josephine, which works out for Marie, who is expecting a child. Unfortunately, Napoleon has opted to marry a Hapsburg princess to create a new royal bloodline. Marie does not tell the Emperor of his new child, though she does tell Napoleon's mother Laetitia (Dame May Whitty).

As Napoleon rises, falls, is exiled to Elba and then attempts a comeback, Marie eventually goes to him and reveals their child Alexander to him. Will our lovers be truly together, or will history conspire to keep them apart?

If anything, Conquest is lavish with a capital L. The film received two Oscar nominations, one of them for Best Art Direction. It more than earned that nomination, for Conquest has grand sets that sometimes overwhelm the audience. Of particular note is when at the Emperor's welcoming ball. The palace is opulent and massive, filling the screen with its grandness. 

Even in scenes that do not require such visual splendor, Conquest delivers. An effective moment is during the French retreat from Russia. Napoleon is berated to his face by a soldier who initially does not recognize him. The sets provide a plausible Russian winter, which gives the scene an extra touch of sadness at how Napoleon's arrogance has led to misery for his men.

The second nomination was for Charles Boyer as Best Actor. Here, I will quibble with the nomination. I found his performance acceptable. He does have some good moments, such as when attempting to learn to dance. The sight of the Conqueror of Europe attempting to cut a little rug brings a touch of levity to something as opulent as Conquest. The aforementioned scene of his retreat is also effective. However, for the most part, I found Boyer a bit exaggerated as Napoleon. 

He and Garbo had an unofficial battle of accents (his French vs. her Swedish), and while they are playing foreigners, it does lend an accidental level of humor; sometimes their scenes together seemed a bit overly dramatic. A case in point is when Marie goes to Elba to reunite with Napoleon and introduce him to his hereto unknown son. As Napoleon goes on about his decision to return, they both started becoming almost unrealistic in playing her disillusionment and distress to his blind ambition.

I think today people would look upon Garbo as also slightly exaggerated in her manner. However, she more than makes up for any overacting with her luminous quality. As she sees Napoleon ride off, Garbo's tearful eyes glisten, making her look more beautiful.

The supporting cast was better, particularly the female supporting players. Marie Ouspenskaya and Dame May Whitty are not in Conquest long. However, they both lend Conquest a bit of humor to what could have been a stodgy period film; there is a great scene where Napoleon calls on Marie. Ouspenskaya, as the addled Dowager Countess, does not recognize the Emperor and thinks that he is merely the corporal Napoleon told her that he was. While playing cards, the illogic of the Dowager Countess' beliefs builds to a humorous rage, with her violent anger and threats to call on Louis XVI to deal with this impertinent soldier almost charming.

The same goes for Dame May Whitty as Napoleon's mother. Initially hostile to his son's newest mistress, her imperious manner soon gives way to an almost motherly affection. Whitty also has a great scene with Boyer when Napoleon is on Elba, advising him that looking through his telescope won't bring France any closer. 

The male supporting cast did not fare as well, all of them coming across as stiff and grand.

Conquest is worth watching for the grand sets and the beauty of Greta Garbo. You also have fun turns from Marie Ouspenskaya and Dame May Whitty to enjoy. While I found the leads a bit overly dramatic, I think Conquest met its goal to tell its story of epic love. 

1786-1817

DECISION: C+