Susan Granger’s review of “La Vie en Rose” (Picturehouse)
Iconic chanteuse Edith Piaf was a Gallic Judy Garland – her life as legendary as her unmistakably soulful voice.
But instead of honoring traditional biography continuity, writer/director Olivier Dahan lets her story unfold in episodic, nonlinear fashion, transitioning from one time period to another with few defining guideposts, opening in New York City in 1959, then flashing back to her Dickensian childhood.
Born in Belleville, Paris, in 1915, Edith was abandoned by her mother and left in the care of her paternal grandmother, who ran a brothel in Normandy, where she was ‘mothered’ by a prostitute (Emmanuelle Seigner). In childhood, Edith went blind, regaining her sight only after a pilgrimage to honor Saint Therese de Lisieux. At age 14, Edith was reclaimed by her father, an acrobat who toured with a circus. Then she became a scrappy street performer in Pigalle, where nightclub owner Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) discovered her, named her Piaf (“little sparrow”) and made her a star. The great love of her life was 1948 Middleweight Boxing Champ Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins) who died in a plane crash in 1949. Subject to bouts of rage, depression and alcoholic binges, Piaf was in a car accident which led to serious morphine addiction; she died of cancer at age 47 in 1963.
Curiously, Olivier Dahan chooses to barely allude to Piaf’s first husband and the loss of their baby and never notes her relationship with Yves Montand or heroic work with the French Resistance during WW.II.
What makes this bleak vagabond melodrama extraordinary is Marion Cotillard’s mesmerizing performance. She doesn’t play Piaf, she embodies her, lip-sync’ing to recordings. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “La Vie en Rose” is an evocative 7 – in French with English subtitles.
