Cast: Marion Cotillard, Gerard Depardieu

Director: Oliver Dahan

Screenplay: Oliver Dahan

Running time: 2 hrs 12 mins

Genre: Biopic/Drama/Foreign


REVIEW:


Because biopics are told in a traditional, chronological manner, from bleak days of childhood, to rising superstardom, then to hellish drug abuse, and to the triumphant ascent into messianic status – it’s time for a rejig. Todd Haynes has done it with his Bob Dylan biopic I’M NOT THERE, and now the biopic of the legendary French musical artist Edith Piaf LA VIE EN ROSE inclines to do the same, but without the six persona formula, which Haynes brilliantly executed to nail Dylan’s erratic character. Oliver Dahan seemed to throw the whole biopic guidebook out of the window and screw the whole straightforward manner. In result, LA VIE EN ROSE, while maintaining a whole one-woman show, combines the complex portrait of this French chanteuse with a kind of storytelling that goes backwards and forwards. Not that it causes some levels of annoyance, but it certainly forms a tousled look and feel of the film, a piece of celluloid that hardly settles of subtlety.


Nevertheless, it’s an impressive portrait of the chanteuse Edith Piaf. In the story, we embark on Piaf’s ragged upbringing after being abandoned by her mother at Southern France, and being whisked away by her father to be brought up in a brothel, and leading her life into the carnival as well. These odd environments shaped a distinctly tough woman, and soon sing in the streets of Paris for a penny. There she was discovered, and hence her rise to fame became inevitable as she was hailed “the soul of Paris”. Most of all, she learns about love, heartbreak and tragedy. One brilliantly handled scene was her discovery of the death of her lover in her bedroom, a grief-ridden scene of such emotional ferocity that haunted Piaf’s life for eternal damnation.


Despite of the jaggedness of the film, the whole sprawling scope of tragedy, melodrama and soap-operatic grittiness mounts heavily on Marion Cotillard’s shoulders, as she delivers a gloriously extraordinary Oscar-worthy performance as Edith Piaf. Her hauntingly accurate portrayal of this flighty songbird is an impressive feat, probably one of the most fascinating, mostly deservingly rewarding performances by an actress ever captured in celluloid history. It’s an unflinching, uncompromising performance by Cotillard, and she definitely deserved her recent Oscar Best Actress statue. Take that, Julie Christie! It doesn’t only take a woman trying to look confused and mental to deserve an Oscar, whereas Cotillard gets into the verve and vitality of Piaf, singing so passionately to the core. It’s so remarkable to see a young, mostly unknown actress from France, playing an old woman trying to be young, as the film journeys to and fro, with leaps from childhood to desperate adulthood, when Piaf suffers from sickness.


THE FINAL WORD:


Somehow one could wish the director should have told this story in a more straightforward way. LA VIE EN ROSE is not your most compelling biopic ever shot, but undisputedly offers an astounding, dazzlingly enthralling central performance by Marion Cotillard. After all, this is her show and it’s the most chameleonic portrayal by an actress you’ll ever see in years since Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf in THE HOURS.


RATING: B+