There's no American equivalent to France's Edith Piaf, although if pressed you might consider Elvis Presley, Billie Holiday and Iggy Pop all rolled up into one diminutive, iconoclastic package. A certified cultural institution in La Belle France, Piaf was as gifted as she was self-destructive, with a public image and musical repertoire forever fused in ways that make it pointless, if not impossible, trying to separate the singer's life from her art.
This naturally makes Piaf an ideal subject for a biopic, and that project finally arrives in the form of La Vie en Rose. There's no telling what Hollywood might have done with the stuff of Piaf's life, so we can only thank our lucky stars that, for once, our Gallic neighbors got there first.
For starters, there's no conventional rise and fall (and rise again) to the story told in La Vie en Rose, no attempt to create pleasingly simplistic symmetry out of what was by all accounts a pretty messy existence. If anything, La Vie en Rose accentuates the messiness, ricocheting through Piaf's life to give full vent to the woman's immense contradictions, while demonstrating how the more things changed for her, the more they stayed the same. Piaf — a stage name that is French slang for "little sparrow" — was born in the gutter and, regardless of how high she flew, one foot always remained there. That continues to be very much part of the appeal: This little sparrow was many things to many people, but she was first and foremost a bird with a wing down.
La Vie en Rose offers us a remarkable Piaf in Marion Cotillard (Russell Crowe's plaything in A Good Year), then mirrors its subject's troublesome nature by flirting with both traditional Hollywood-esque storytelling and a gritty postmodern deconstruction. On one hand, the film feels like a William Burroughs cut-up experiment, skipping back and forth through the events of Piaf's life with what sometimes seems like aggressive randomness. These sequences are occasionally even shot with that deliberately jittery, post-Dogme camerawork that seeks to disorient us while somehow signifying a more "real" reality. (The even "realer" reality is that this desperate anti-style is almost certain to soon look as dated as '70s zooms and '80s music videos do now.)
But then there's the other La Vie en Rose, a big, solid, richly cinematic Euro-art epic of the sort that American audiences used to (and, on occasion, still do) eat up — filled with picturesque scenery, French accordion music and Gerard Depardieu. This is the main face of La Vie en Rose and, truth be told, it's a pretty attractive one — a sleek and fabulously chic enterprise that offers the pleasures of pure escapism even when it's wallowing in the mire. The grit and sleaze are never far from the surface, but this is a movie that (like Piaf herself) manages to be wildly romantic even in its cynicism, that knows the importance of dreams and deities. At one point, La Vie en Rose even stops in its tracks for a divine visitation from Marlene Dietrich herself, who floats across the screen to tell Piaf, "Your voice is the soul of Paris," then disappears.
Non-Francophiliacs and viewers otherwise unfamiliar with Piaf's legend may occasionally find themselves lost in the film's fractured chronology as La Vie en Rose flits to and fro, touching down on key events in the singer's life via roughly a dozen different time periods. We get, in no particular order, glimpses of Piaf's early years, singing for her supper on the mean streets of Montmarte; her meteoric rise to fame in the mid-'30s; the inevitable slide into increasingly serious self-medication; a fabled New York sojourn in the '50s, where she meets and then tragically loses the great love of her life; and, of course, scenes from Piaf's charmingly seedy childhood, growing up in a circus and in a bordello where she learns songs from the lips of the whores. Raised by unhappy, unstable women, little Edith became one herself, albeit with an unquenchable lust for life.
The film's temporal scrambling becomes a little extreme, but even if you miss one or two of the dates that pop up at the head of each new sequence, there are other clues that help identify where we are in time. The main tip-off is usually Piaf's physical appearance, which changes drastically over the years, largely due to the ravages of drugs, booze and endless heartbreak. (You can almost chart the singer's age by the thinness of her eyebrows, plucked in later years to resemble the exaggerated arcs painted on clown faces from her circus past.)
Cotillard is simply astonishing here, as fully believable playing a buoyant 18-year-old as she is portraying a withered corpse-in-waiting, bitterly paranoid, riddled with cancer and practically unable to feed herself. Piaf was only 47 when she died in 1963, but she looked at least three decades older, and Cotillard gets this just right, too. One moment we're looking at the fresh-faced, newly anointed toast of the town, and in a heartbeat she's a stooped, trembling crone peering nervously at the world from under a wispy red fringe of Bozo hair.
La Vie en Rose doesn't go in for flourishes (with a life this big, there's really no reason for hyperbole), nor does it feel the need to sugarcoat Piaf's personality. What we get here is Edith Piaf, warts and all, a monumental artist riddled with insecurities and as given to romantic idealism as she is to the cruelties of the street. This is a woman who could be extraordinarily compassionate, but the film also shows us Piaf as compulsively needy, petty and often abusive, a drunken tyrant crudely lashing out at whoever had the misfortune of being in her line of fire. The movie's great achievement is that it gives us a character we can't help but be completely engaged with, even when she's being rather hateful.
At the heart of the film, as you might expect, is the music. The many songs performed here are not translated into English, sadly, but the vitality and the conviction of the voice cuts through any language barriers. Only one song gets the honor of a translation — Piaf's signature Non, je ne Regrette rien (No, I Have No Regrets), and that's entirely fitting. It's a piece of music with a relentless forward thrust that feels more like a martial anthem than a pop song, and what better tribute to a woman who went down fighting?
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2007.