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+