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| La Vie en Rose |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 140 |
| Public Rating: 9.50 (2 votes) |
Director: Olivier Dahan |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Biography Picture |
Year: 2007 |
| Writer(s): Isabelle Sobelman |
| Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Additional review(s) by:
Yorgo Douramacos [7/10] (view).
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The French version of “Ray” and “Walk the Line,” it’s not really any better or worse than those films but this just happens to be when I put my foot down and say “I need more.” Rise, fall, drugs, love, stage performances, and no real throughline, because, while our lives may have plots and obstacles and villains scattered throughout them, most people don’t have a SINGLE plot, obstacle, and villain we meet near birth and conclude around death. The subject is French street urchin-turned-cabaret singer-turned-‘50s pop star Edith Piaf. Like Ray and Cash (and Capote and Edward R. Murrow), Edith is portrayed by Marion Cotilliard with delightful exaggeration and a profusion of imitated mannerisms. Peculiar that we tolerate a higher level of abstraction in performances based on real people but demand greater realism from fictional characters; if an actor wants to give an exaggerated, outlandish performance in a drama, he’s best off playing a real person. I’d never seen or even heard of Edith Piaf before “La Vie en Rose” but I could tell by Cotilliard’s performance – as an adorable little troll who eventually gets bent into an inverted uppercase L – that she had enlarged Piaf’s most well-known quirks. Unlike the set-bound biopics of the first half of the 20th century, these films take as many pains to reconstruct the era and places in which their heroes lived as they do in recreating their heroes. Not just Paris and New York, but dives and alleys and the last days of the cabarets and music halls before the recording industry muscled them out. “La Vie en Rose” is well-made and perfectly adequate, with a great, long multi-room tracking shot on the morning she discovers her love has died, and the whole thing has very good music and a diverting, fractured chronology. But at 2 ½ hours it’s way too long. “Amadeus” (and “Amadeus II: Immortal Beloved”) really is the greatest biopic because it’s actually ABOUT something. Oscar winner for Makeup and surprise winner for Best Actress.
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