>>REVIEW
LA VIE EN ROSE
STARRING Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Gérard Depardieu and Pascal Greggory
DIRECTED BY Olivier Dahan
Opens Friday, June 22
Uptown Screen
Don’t ask a morphine addict for her side of the story unless you’re prepared for a skewed version of events. Recalling bad trips might be essential for gonzo journalism, but at least one foreign bio-pic, La Vie En Rose, would benefit from a bit of perspective. The exaggeration of a first-person narrative needs to be firmly directed to sketch an arc and pull parallels in an otherwise tragically chaotic recollection.
The life of Edith Piaf, the iconic Parisian songstress who serenaded France from her discovery in 1935 until her death in 1963, was a true tragedy. Abandoned first by her mother and then her father, she suffered from lifelong health issues ranging from blindness to morphine addiction, which eventually destroyed her singing career, causing onstage collapses followed by months of hospitalization. Piaf’s vivacity allowed her to triumph over her hardships, or at least to persevere through them, and while she spent her life trying to forget her painful past, it was her pain that motivated her devastating voice, racked with honesty and explosive determination.
Marion Cotillard plays Piaf with stunning ferocity, perfectly balancing Piaf’s delusional self-aggrandizement with her vulnerability. She swings from unabashed smiles, sitting across a table from the man she loves, to the rage that erupts when someone, friend or otherwise, challenges her. Cotillard captures the cavalier gait of "the little sparrow" at age 17 as perfectly as Piaf’s disintegrated shuffle at age 47. While Piaf’s recordings are used instead of Cotillard’s own voice, Cotillard’s hand movements and characterization combine for an impeccable re-creation. The singing tells only a part of Edith Piaf, and Cotillard dedicates herself to the role, railing against her friends and enemies with the same tyrannical energy.
Such a strong, tumultuous performance requires a director and a script capable of reigning in the melodrama, of pulling meaning and direction out of chaos. Unfortunately, neither director Olivier Dahan or co-writer Isabelle Sobelman step up to the task. The incoherent story is a mishmash of memories, a look back at Piaf’s life through a very narrow viewfinder where self-pity drowns out any highs and leaves only a tragic string of woe-is-me moments. Using flashbacks and flash-forwards, Dahan strives to convey the discord of Piaf’s life, successfully communicating discordant tragedy but failing to draw parallels in the transitions or develop a cohesive plotline or set pattern. The severe ups and downs pull so quickly that the effect is disorienting, like the rush of a quick high and the plummet of withdrawal, leaving no lasting sense of the arch of the doomed artist’s life. Too often, La Vie En Rose seems a struggle against Dahan’s determination to rob Piaf of Cotillard’s carefully crafted nuances, leaving her either wailing on her knees in a hallway or laughing hysterically as she, once again, nosedives her happiness into the bottom of a bottle of wine.
Dahan similarly mishandles the supporting characters, whose forceful performances need either direction or script indicators to show their importance, or lack thereof. Instead, characters and plot points burst screen with the finesse of a junkie’s recollections, surging into the film without explanation and leaving without a second thought. While the actors deliver impeccable performances, their importance to both Piaf and the film is a mystery.
Dahan also misjudges his focal points, such as when, at Piaf’s first performance at the Olympia Music Hall, he chooses to play a wimpy overture of elevator music instead of showcasing Piaf’s voice. The director substitutes a pan shot of the radio hall’s audience, their faces turned up in smiles at a sound that the movie theatre audience can’t hear. When the applause sweeps in at full volume, the audience feels robbed of the feature of the piece, Piaf’s voice.
Though Piaf’s songs and music are indispensable to the story, the undeniable star of La Vie En Rose is Cotillard herself. Cotillard becomes Piaf and envelops herself in the self-pity and delusion suffered by abused talents shoved into stardom. Instead of reeling in the persona Cotillard throws herself into, Dahan indulges it and shows us Edith’s life from her point of view, a little sparrow constantly down-and-out and abandoned by those whom she loves. In doing this Dahan turns pity away from Edith instead of towards her, allowing a self-indulgent addictive perspective to mar what could have been a swelling tragedy of the true voice of a nation. |
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