2005 Cesar Award winner Marion Cotillard takes a big bite in assuming the responsibility of playing French icon Edith Piaf but she hits a home run. In one of the most powerful performances of the year Cotillard assumes the anguished identity of the French chanteuse throughout the troubled, and triumphant, last twenty years of Piaf’s life. Discovered at twenty and gone at forty seven, the last twenty seven years of her life made her a legend that will live for hundreds to come.
Director/Writer Olivier Dahan (co-written by Isabelle Sobelman) shows the life of the heroine from birth to death. Her first fifteen years were nothing less than a miracle of survival. A sickly child growing up in the harshest of environments, Piaf suffered immeasurably in the streets of post WWI Paris, emerging at age fourteen as part of her father’s acrobatic street act.
From birth to age fourteen she was blind and partially deaf for years, regaining her senses after the prostitutes in her grandmother’s brothel pooled their money for her pilgrimage to honor Saint Therese de Lisieux.
Director Dahan and cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata (César Best Cinematography “Officer's Ward”--2001) walk the line between the realism of Fellini’s moving “La Strada” (1954) and poignant “Nights of Cabiria” (1957) and the accessibility of Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” The result is a gripping and beautiful film noir about a woman who survives the worst that society can inflict and channels that survival into song.
Nagata’s cinematography and the fascinating sets and costumes of Production Designer Olivier Raoux provide a great look into the passionate and turbulent times of pre-WWII Paris. The street scenes and characters alone are worth the price of admission.
The boxing sequence with Piaf’s lover, Middle Weight Boxing Champion Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), is shot from above in bold colors and patterns and prodigious, massive movement. The resulting visual images are as powerful as the fighters themselves; their strength and anguish flows from the screen and is reflected in Piaf’s loving eyes as the sense of doom for her one true love grows with every punch.
As Piaf ages, the make-up department of seven persons performs miracles in taking her from a tough street urchin (she was only 4’ 8” tall) to a forty-something woman who looks eighty. Director Dahan carefully manages the progression of Piaf’s performance from a rough street act at age sixteen to a physically and mentally developed artist around the time of WWII.
The problem with making realistic films of gruesome hardship is that they are constantly teetering on the ragged edge of pity. The task for the director is to make the characters believable without throwing them at the audience’s feet and begging for mercy.
The beautiful thing about Cotillard’s performance is that she expresses the joy that Piaf found in life even during the hardest of times. There is a barely suppressed smile, an inside joke, in her head all the time as the world first denounces her, and then heralds her as a queen. But the most difficult part of the performance is expressing Piaf’s panic and depression when she sees her ability to sing being drawn away by her morphine addiction.
She is weak and strong at the same time, as much a slave to her art as its curator. But the film does lapse into the maudlin as Piaf apparently bends under the weight of her passion and drinks like there is no tomorrow and her morphine addiction plunges her further into despair. Realistic enough, but we are not completely prepared for her complete surrender to the temptations of the world and her subsequent come-back.
Because the film focuses on the main character it is easy to overlook the fact that it is a massive production with a cast of some 120 performers. The art directors, set decorators, costume designers and make-up department persons alone total 14 persons, and the beauty and clarity of the images show it.
The film grossed $40 million in its first two months after opening at the Berlin Film Festival in February of 2007.
A quality production from beginning to end.
La Vie en Rose (La Mome)
Released: June 8, 2007. MPAA: Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, sexual content, brief nudity, language and thematic elements.
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