When I was a child of four living with my Grandma Nofre and Grandpa John in Ely, Nevada, I recall a late afternoon when we were gathered in their living room listening to the radio. A song came on that delighted me and I started dancing. I couldn't help myself. Even though it made my grandparents laugh, I had to dance to that song.
Fast forward to 18 and I'm in another living room in Lucky Hollow, Pennsylvania, and my host puts on an album and suddenly there's this song that I remember from my childhood. I have my wits about me to ask him, "Who's singing? What's the name of that song?" He brought me the album cover and allowed me to attach Edith Piaf and "La Goualante de Pauvre Jean (The Poor People of Paris)" to my childhood memory. He then introduced me to the chanteuse tradition of which The Little Sparrow was the irridescent exemplar.
SFIFF50 Program Capsule for La Vie En Rose
Filmmaker Review (Scott Maucalay)
Greencine Review (David Hudson)
Greencine Review (James van Maanen)
Fast forward to my mid-20s and my first visit to Paris. My traveling companion Lee Jarnagin has taken me to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Keen to my intimate eccentricities, he waits patiently while I hum La Goualante de Pauvre Jean to Piaf's grave. I can't adequately explain to him why paying homage to influence brings me to tears.
Fast forward to October 2003 where—to celebrate my surviving to 50—I've given myself a month in Paris, fulfilling every romantic innuendo I've harbored for the previous two decades: an apartment in the Left Bank; coffee-stained dog-eared paperbacks, strolls along the Seine accompanied by plaintive accordions and a heart full of winging sparrows tinged by late afternoon light. And because Mystery is so sweet in her dispensations of grace, it just so happened that on that birthday visit Paris had mounted two celebratory exhibitions: one for Jean Cocteau at the Pompidou and one for La Môme at l'Hôtel de Ville. Since the latter was a free public exhibition and near my apartment, I returned several times to savor the thematic installations, thrilling to the film clips of Piaf's performances, and the photographs that chronicled her passionate, all too brief life. I drank Piaf until I was drunk and must admit I've never suffered a hangover and need only to hear her voice to suddenly be 4 again, then 18, then 22, then 50. Her voice contains the span of a lifetime, her's, my own, perhaps everyone's if they have anything near to a heart that measures the sad inevitable passage of time.
Thus you can imagine how much I have anticipated Olivier Dahan's La Vie En Rose, the closing night entry to SFIFF50. Without question, generous samplings of Piaf's music and Marion Cotillard's passionate performance redeem the film's failings. Cotillard's portrayal of Piaf—as Scott Macaulay describes it for Filmmaker—"blasts through historical detail to get at emotional truths about the life of an artist." Comparable to Forrest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland—another flawed vehicle—Cotillard deserves flung roses for elevating the script handed to her and clearly she will be among the hopeful quintet of actresses nominated at the next Oscars.
My reservations about the film as a whole, however, have been voiced by several critics following its premiere at the Berlinale earlier this year and then later at the "Rendez-Vous With French Cinema" series at New York's Lincoln Center. David Hudson's dispatch to The Greencine Daily remains the most fair and articulate. Complaining that the film's "sudden leaps are neither clever nor obvious" and way too frequent—interfering with the film's "narrative traction"—Hudson offers compensatorily that through this temporally disjunctive device "we realize [very late in the game] that we've been watching shards shed from the spotty memory of an ailing drug addict, which is supposed to explain why we've been not so much jumping as flailing around the chronology of Piaf's tragically short life."
I love his term "narrative traction" because it aptly describes the momentum that needs to be built up in order to access the emotions that inform the film's events. Sadly, that momentum is repeatedly thwarted so that I was left feeling little about Piaf's impoverished childhood and many of the tragic events of her life and for someone who personifies impassioned emotion, this seemed an oddly misplaced judgment on the part of Olivier Dahan. I hope to understand his intentions more fully when he attends closing night.
On the other hand, he achieves some brave directorial flourishes that are both bold and evocative. James van Maanen elaborates in his dispatch to The Greencine Daily: "[Dahan] takes some quite interesting risks, as well: silencing the striking Piaf voice during an important concert, thus allowing us to concentrate on Cotillard's visual presentation and the audience response to that performance." That scene remains one of my favorite frissons from the film. The encounter with Marlene Dietrich was likewise exciting though I wish her subsequent friendship with Piaf would have been further explored. And Jean-Pierre Martin's heartthrob portrayal of boxer Marcel Cedan is virile and magnetic.
I have to be one of the most unabashed Marion Cotillard lovers out there. Jeux D'Enfants was the movie that sold me. And I've been quite looking forward to La Vie En Rose for some time now.
As a fan of Piaf I can't wait for this film I just hope that it visits our shores too!
ah come now, Maya, I love this site and we´re all friends here.
This site could use some criticism now and then, that´s all. It´s all a bit to lovey-dovey when everything posted is met with a wave of jubilation. Without criticism or conflict of opinion, things tend to fall apart.
Besides, I´m a huge romantic for Paris, but if you go there all Amélie Poulain´d and don´t pepper it with some realism then reality will run you over in a bent-up Peugeot 206.
Artistic liberty is often taken by writers/Directors but Piaf's character was so exaggerated by the filmmaker that I came out of the theater disappointed to say the least. Only a week or so ago I had read in a French magazine that people that had known Piaf weren't happy with the portrayal as it stood. I saw La vie en rose at a premiere in Los Angeles, with its 24 million dollars budget,this film does not answer the burning questions or expectations from an audience in love with the music of Edit Piaf.The film opens up in complete silence. One would expect from the get go to hear Piaf's voice soaring above us all in an engaging well known song,to get us excited,only silence for the longest time. She is portrayed as a drunk and a drug addict from early childhood. Her "erratic " behavior overshadows her artistry. Not once are we treated to moments in Piaf's life where we can witness her amazing drive and discipline to learn and interpret songs. Not once is it mentioned that she was the voice of Paris in world war 2, that period in time is totally ignored(In fact around me people were buzzing about it). But most importantly what should grab you is that extraordinary voice filled with all the joy and sorrow, in Olivier dahan"La vie en rose",the majority of the songs are interpreted by a would be imitator of Piaf(Jill Aigrote),only without that deep emotional chilling extraordinary voice. Only 2 or 3 songs were of Piaf singing herself. Where did the 24 million dollars go? They should have gone to at least cover the rights to the original recordings or find the right someone that would not have imitated Piaf but rather bring in that tour de force in her own right. Although the actress, thanks to brilliant make up, changes from the young Piaf to the older Piaf,she stills lip-synchs and that bothers me, I am always conscient of it while watching the film which is tooooooo long.Piaf's diction was legendary,in this film she has a speech problem(at times it reminded me of Jerry Lewis and his antics). The scenes are edited frantically to go back and forth in time endlessly, in fact at the end of the movie, the Director brings in this bizarre revelation of Piaf's child dying as a child, which belonged in the beginning of the film, so out of place. There 's a scene shot in Palm Spring showing Piaf being interviewed by an American journalist while she is knitting by the ocean. I missed something,there are no beaches in Palm springs.
They have Piaf drunk and drugged from childhood, always bent in two, walking like an old person from the age of 17 on. In "La vie en rose" she became a caricature and a parody far from the real persona. Just listen to Piaf's recordings, it's all in there: discipline,focus,hard work,sobriety(you had to be sober sometime to have recorded so many songs and so perfectly). That's never shown in the film.
Olivier dahan admiited it himself,he never wrote a script before,why tackle such a legend for his first try? Almodovar,Veber,Scorcese,he is not,it's evident.
I give an award to the make up artist, and to Marion Cotillard for putting up with it. With a little more research on Cotillard's part,she would embraced the true persona of Piaf and not one Dahan fabricated and exagerated.
Josh, yours is a bracing critique that I am quite in agreement with. Thank you for taking the time to voice your disappointment so articulately.
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