If the last few years of film making are remembered for anything besides bloated action films, rubbery computer animated flesh and endless sequels, it will likely be as the golden age of the musician bio-pic. Not to suggest that we've perfected the posthumous biographical treatment, and be aware that for every Walk the Line or Ray there's a De-lovely or Beyond The Sea. But this decade has come out swinging in honor of musical persona, a fact that reaches beyond the shores of Hollywood. With 2007's French production, La Vie En Rose, Europe officially took part in the trend.
La Vie En Rose follows the formula, establishing multiple time frames, painting the subject at various ages. It's crucial for this sort of film for the main character to have been raised in poverty, as a share cropper in Georgia, or Arkansas or, as was the case with Edith Piaf, as an indigent street urchin in Paris.
Edith Piaf was a small, sad, hard living and large voiced singer. She was under five feet tall and her last name, a false one, originally given by her mentor as a nickname, means, "sparrow." In the film we first meet her as she collapses on stage in 1957, then again at age four, in 1918, with her mother who is singing for coins on the streets of Bellville in Paris. The real Edith Piaf, more so than almost any other person, embodies a particularly Parisian Frenchness. Her robust voice, singing lyrics in lilting melodies about the sadness of joy and the joy of sadness, evokes postcard Paris and also that of life long Parisians. She is claimed by France and the world as a window on the Parisian French soul.
La Vie En Rose fits neatly in the emerging bio-pic tradition. It moves crisply between scenes of emotional tumult and builds a familiarity between audience and character by increments that pay-off slowly. The film making and acting are immense achievements. Scenes are staged well, the make-up is astonishing and the beautiful Marion Cotillard (courageous to hide her beauty so fully behind Piaf's more cockeyed graces) embodies the eccentric magnetism of Piaf with confidence. Yet the persistent time-splice editing, though it builds in a deliberate and dramatically credible pattern, leaves one to wonder what would have been so wrong with linear story telling.
Certainly it is a thrill to view Cotillard's various performances, over time, differing with each of Piaf's experiences and infirmity, lined up next to one another; and we do get to empathize with the aging Edith's frustration when, on her deathbed, she says she can no longer choose what she remembers. But so much of Piaf's life was fire and trial; it feels a bit like a cop out to constantly be dropping back or leaping forward just as things get really difficult.
The soul of Piaf's music was her resilient joy, blending with a dolorous, almost philosophic acceptance of suffering. I should like to have seen more simple moments of Edith being Edith. Something small to juxtapose with the Grande Dame Performer and victim of fate's Caprice. The two most memorable moments in the film come when she is somewhere small, and hears a voice she can trust. The first is when, as a child traveling with her father in a circus troupe, she stumbles upon a fire eater practicing. As he blows flame in the air she sees and hears an apparition of Saint Theresa who promises her protection. Later, after she is a star and is playing in New York on Broadway she goes to dinner with a Frenchman living in New York. He takes her to dinner at a local Deli and their scene discussing the enigma of a pastrami sandwich is small and sweet and ever so slightly sad.
La Vie En Rose has an intoxicating energy but never quite lives up to the power of its parts. I would very much like to see the film that could be made of the moments between the ones on screen.
