Edith Piaf may not be a familiar name to many Americans growing up now but she remains an icon in France. The life story of singer Edith Piaf provides the drama for the new French film
La Vie en Rose (opening June 15 at Landmarks La Jolla Village Theaters).
Known by her nickname, The Little Sparrow, chanteuse Edith Piaf dazzled audiences around the globe with a passionate, powerful voice that boomed forth from a tiny, frail body. In the film La Vie en Rose , French filmmaker Olivier Dahan tries to create a portrait of the singer that captures the drama inherent in both her songs and her life.
Young Edith performs in La Vie en Rose (Picturehouse)
Dahan serves up a fractured narrative that jumps around in time to deliver what he calls an impressionistic "emotional journey." The film begins near the end of Piafs live as the singer collapses during a New York performance. Then we jump back in time to see Edith's troubled childhood. Her mother aspired to a singing career but never got much past alcohol and singing on street corners. Her father was a circus contortionist who took little Edith away from her mother only to leave her with her grandmother who ran a brothel. There she's befriended by a prostitute named Titine (Emmauelle Seigner is a brief and rather hysterical performance). But Edith proved sickly and the film shows her going through a period when she couldn't see (possibly severe conjunctivitis). But a prayer and a pilgrimmage to St. Therese "miraculously" restores her sight.
If we arrange all the pieces of the film in chronological order, Edith (played as a adult by Marion Cotillard) eventually leaves the brothel, travels with her father for a bit and then heads off on her own. She is befriended by Momone (Sylvia Tetsud), another street urchin. Edith sings anywhere she can and makes enough money to barely get by. Then she's discovered by Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu), a club owner who senses her raw talent. From there she finds her way to fame but its a troubled path. Recovery from a car crash apparently leads to a morphine addiction; she has a pair of failed marriages; a heated affair with a boxer; and a diva's disposition. But the one constant is her burning desire to sing.
Dahan comes from a music video background (mostly doing videos for the band the Cranberries) so it's not surprising that the two most powerful moments in the film are musical ones. When young Edith (played by Pauline Burlet) sings for the first time and belts out the French national anthem, it's a show stopper. As is a scene in which a sickly Edith at the end of her career performs what would be a signature song, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (which roughly translates as no regrets or I regret nothing). In these two scenes, we get a sense of Edith's artistic passion and why she achieved such renown.
Dahan states in the press materials that he wanted to make a film about "what drives an artist" and he chose "someone who places no barrier between her life and her art." This leads Dahan to another effective and more stylishly flamboyant scene. As Edith reels from a personal tragedy, she runs frantically through her apartment. But as she races down hallways and through doors, she ultimately ends up walking out onto a stage and singing her heart out. The scene offers a surreal visualization of how Edith pulled from her own life when performing. But thats really the closest Dahan ever gets to providing us with any insights into what drives this particular artist.
Piaf wrote some of her own songs but we never get a sense of that from the film. The film focuses too much on the diva side of her persona, on the extremes of her life. This may make for grand melodramatic scenes but it rarely lets us in close so that we gleam some insights or even that we get to feel like we come to know who she is as a person. Dahan sweeps audiences up in big waves of emotion. Maybe the film would have been more satisfying if Dahan had stayed with what he knows best--music videos. Perhaps he could have constructed the whole film in a more surreal, impressionistic manner and constructed a series of music videos linking each song to something in Piaf's life. But as the film stands, it straddles two film styles: a standard biopic and a more freeflowing musical interpretation of a life.
Sylvia Tetsud and Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose (Picturehouse)
In terms of relationships, Dahan keeps Edith's friendship with Momone as a constant running in the background but we know nothing of how they met or why they cling so firmly to each other. The one male romance he focuses on involving fighter Marcel Cerdan (played by French rock star Jean-Pierre Martins)has a dreamy quality that avoids the supposedly tumultuous nature of the real affair.
But Dahan doesn't really delve into Piaf's artistry and creativity beyond the fact of her actual singing. By that I mean, he shows her performing, provides a brief scene of her training and then little else about her craft. Why can't we see her working to write her own songs? That would seem to fit perfectly into Dahan's vision of her as an artist who draws on her own life. One major annoyance in the film is that with the exception of the final song, Dahan refuses to subtitle any of the lyrics. Maybe he didn't want to distract us with reading as Edith is singing but how can we fully appreciate how her life and art intertwined if we don't know the specifics of what she's singing about. Sure we can understand the emotional thrust of the song but not the details. Piaf also had an eye for talent; she discovered young talent like Yves Montand, but that's not evident in the film either.
Dahan depicts her as a high strung performer who seems disconnected from the craft of creating her art. The only interest she seems to have is in making demands on everyone to provide for her every whim. What we end up with is a film that plays on a familiar formula (albeit one more often employed for rock stars) of a person overcoming hard knocks, finding fame, getting addicted to drugs, and dying too young. The formula was used most notably for Lady Sings the Blues and The Rose (films that depicted Billie Holiday and a Janis Joplin-like singer respectively).
As for Marion Cotillards performance, it's as erratic as the film. There are definitely moments of passion yet there are other times when she comes across as a clownish caricature of Piaf. In these moments of exaggerated pantomime, I felt like I should have been watching a silent film. Cotillard (who you may not recognize as the woman from A Good Year ) does manage to look quite a bit like Piaf. Sylvia Tetsud (who was absolutely riveting in another true life drama, Murderous Maids ) is intense as Momone while Gerard Depardieu and Pascal Gregory are kept to the periphery as men who proved helpful and supportive of Edith.
La Vie en Rose (rated PG-13 for substance abuse, sexual content, brief nudity, language and thematic elements) provides a tantalizing introduction to the tiny dynamo that was Edith Piaf but it's far from being a definitive or enlightening portrait of the famous singer.
Companion viewing: French Cancan (in which the real Piaf has a role), Moulin Rouge, Murderous Maids
