bright flame burned out by 47
Written: Jun 20 '07 (Updated Jun 20 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: an emotionally searing, impressionistic biopic, a jewel of French cinema
Cons: could be hard to follow for those who prefer a more conventional narrative structure
The Bottom Line: For fans of Edith Piaf, this is the movie you've been waiting for. For others, this movie may convert you to her special aura.
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| seric26's Full Review: La Vie En Rose |
A problem some viewers are having with this film is how disordered it seems. It's not a straightforward chronological biopic, where causality is preserved from points A to B to C.
Instead, it's a disjointed cyclical tapestry, with Piaf seen at various ages and in various scenarios, one that seems to fit her unstable life where she moved from one brief safe haven to the next, until earning a short period of stability, financial success, great acclaim and love all at once at the height of her musical career.
That her career happened at all is down to chance, and to an undeniable, unlikely talent that bloomed in the least fertile of soils. Born to a vagabond mother who dreamed of a musical career she never attained, and a circus performer father who made some effort to take responsibility for his daughter (though he could barely provide for himself usually), Edith is adrift from birth. Her father leaves her for military duty, and comes home to find her abandoned with a mentally unstable Grandmother, sickly and nearly comatose.
His solution: drop her off with HIS mother, the stern madame of a successful brothel. There she is nurtured by the childless prostitutes, and achieves a measure of stability thanks to the iron hand (hiding a nevertheless tender heart) of the madame, who never admits publically to being her grandmother. The faithful prostitutes instill in Edith her sense of spirituality that guides her through the rest of her life, and when she goes temporarily blind due to illness she is carefully nursed back to health.
Then it's off to the circus with the teenage Edith, and in this sequence the young actress resembles the star of Pan's Labirynth. She has the same look of haunted eyes, of a girl wise beyond her years forced to cope with desperate situations. Her father is short with her at times, but it's never really her he's mad at, and some very tender scenes between them explain her lifelong loyalty to him (though once adult she publically repudiates her mother at every turn).
The movie really gets going when we finally see Marion Cotillard, in the first of her stunning star-making series of transformations as the late adolescent Edith, stumbling around the streets of Paris with a girlfriend, and singing for their supper and booze. Eventually we see this rough and ready sparrow transform into an elegant cabaret performer, then an international star, an actress in Cocteau plays, a morphine addict with an arthritic, fragile body aged long before its time, a deathly sick invalid, and many other snapshot moments, each of which the director signifies with an easygoing, naturalistic scene.
These scenes do show up out of order, so we'll move from looking at the final year of Edith's life to a decade earlier, where a French-speaking reporter interviews her in a calm moment on a Malibu beach. There's an amusing series of interludes in New York City, which Edith at first despises but comes to appreciate ("I don't get America, and America doesn't get me!" she snarls at one point). There she performs to good and bad reviews, finds a short-lived love, loses another long-termed one, and meets idols and celebrities of statures equal to her own.
Her long-suffering staff of supporting characters acquit themselves wonderfully, including the requisite cameo (for all good French films) by Gerard Depardieu as an early mentor. Quite what becomes of him, of her mother, of her father, of her discarded lovers, of her career and her health, isn't always all that clear. They appear, and they vanish. The edits aren't frenetic in this movie, but they are rather decisive, whipping us around the world and through time and space in the blink of an eye.
But surely if any national cinema has earned the right to comport itself with a stream of conscious series of Proustian reveries, it is that of the French. This film is one long experience of deja vu on one level, the madeline dipped in the tea cup, recalling vividly times past as vitally as just minutes ago.
The cinematography is effective, tending towards deep shadows and warm reds and browns, with shockingly stark moments of black and white and overlit exposures at appropriate junctures. The makeup is a series of startling recreations of the many phases and ages of Piaf. Just watching her eyebrows transform is mesmerizing. The costumes are wonderful at capturing the early 20th century, especially the flapper era of the 1920s, which seemed to have unfolded along a different path in France than it did in America. Paris of course is a wonderfully crowded, busy city of stone and grand architecture, and New York seems to be a world of rooftops, fire escapes, grand restaurants and cheap diners.
Piaf agonizes late in the movie at the deterioration of her memories, as she can feel them vanishing. But she can never say she didn't live her life to the fullest. Her put upon assistants can attest to the loyalty she engendered, and to the blazing intensity with she infused every searing performance. She goes on despite her health, time and time again. Her fans will be appeased. Cotillard seems to channel the singer as if possessed.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Serious Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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Epinions.com ID:
seric26
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Member: Eric
Location: Boston, MA
Reviews written: 176
Trusted by: 47 members
About Me:
What's it all about? Home entertainment (including reading) and cooking.
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