La Vie En Rose: Movie Review, DVD Review, Trailer (2008)

Directed by Olivier Dahan, written by Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman, 140 minutes, rated PG-13. In French with English subtitles.

Marion Cotillard, the French actress who portrays Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan's "La Vie En Rose," takes a flawed movie and turns it into something memorable and haunting.

Dahan co-wrote the screenplay with Isabelle Sobelman, and what they have created is a testament to a few things--first, the power of Cotillard's fierce performance, which is nominated this month for an Academy Award for Best Actress, and second to Piaf herself, the hard-luck singer who survived her bum early years as a child in Paris to literally become Paris' favored child.

For those who know and admire the mix of strength, frailty, pluck and heart that rings through Piaf's voice--her "Milord," "Hymne a L'amour," "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" and the song that inspires the title of this film are classics--this movie based on her life wastes no time in underscoring the reasons behind the complex wealth of emotions that collide when Piaf sings.

In this way, "La Vie En Rose" can't help but court the trappings of melodrama, which sometimes works for it and against it. Furthermore, while it isn't always successful in tying up its loose ends--several subplots are oddly dropped, most curiously a critical one involving Gerard Depardieu as the nightclub owner who discovered Piaf--there is an admirable rawness to the production and to Cotillard's performance that gets to the core of a woman who existed on the fringe.

Since much of Piaf's early life is speculation, the movie explores the myth pop culture created for her. We see Edith as a child, when she was prodded by her abusive father to sing on the streets for money. Reluctantly, she did so, singing "La Marseilles" until people cheered. Later, when her father abandoned her, she was shuttled to her grandmother's brothel, where she received love and an enlightening education from a family of whores who came to adore her, most notably a prostitute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) who treated Edith as her own daughter.

As good as these scenes are, it's in the film's exploration of Piaf's rise from sketchy cabaret singer to polished, superstar performer that the movie is at its best and most seductive. It was, after all, during this time in which Piaf fell in love with the boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), who looked like a movie star and loved her like no other. Later, in the wake of a devastating event that won't be revealed here, Piaf's decline into drug and alcohol abuse staked claim to her ruin.

Whether because of her addictions or in spite of them, there always was the sense in that tremulous pull of Piaf's voice that she was letting you into rooms that otherwise, in less giving hands, would have remained closed. To hear her voice wasn't just to hear a woman struggling with the highs and lows of life (she died at 47), but also to hear Paris itself.

In her voice was sorrow, life, defeat and humor, but mostly, like the city that came to embrace her as its own, a sense of absolute acceptance for those who came to it. It's this gift that Piaf possessed that the movie and Cotillard get exactly right, which turns out to be more important than the structural mistakes Dahan makes along the way.

Much like her American contemporaries Judy Garland, who also died at 47, and Billie Holiday, who died at 44, Piaf had that ability to draw everything out of you with a mere song. Her voice could do you in, lay you flat. In that way, there's a certain risk in listening to her, but that risk, in the end, is what made her so great.

Grade: B+