DVD REVIEW: "La Vie En Rose"

“La Vie en Rose” is a thoroughly depressing examination of the admittedly tragic life of singer Edith Piaf that is memorable for its gaps, its omissions and a truly astonishing performance by Marion Cotillard as Ms. Piaf. It is a performance that will be remembered when awards season rolls around, but more about that later.

The problems with the film are all at the screenplay level. The structure of the film—as a series of recollections by Piaf as she is dying—could alibi the gaps, omissions and half-truths, but an alibi is all it would be.

The film does take a lot of time, perhaps too much, to look at Piaf’s early life, although it suggests she was born while her father was a soldier during World War I. Actually she was born a year before her father joined the French Army. In fact, her father put his daughter in the care of his mother, a cook at a brothel, before he joined the army. The film claims this event happened after his enlistment and that his mother was the brothel’s madame, not its cook.

The film also presents the story of Piaf’s alleged three-year blindness (I say “alleged” because all but one of her biographies omit this detail of her early life) during the time she was cared for by the brothel’s prostitutes and her miraculous cure as a result of a pilgrimage to a site honoring Saint Therese de Lisieux. The picture also takes pains to establish a mother-daughter relationship between Piaf and one of the prostitutes, Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner). It gives us a heartbreaking scene in which Piaf’s father (Jean-Paul Rouve) returns to snatch her away from Titine’s care and then promptly forgets Titine ever existed in Piaf’s life. Perhaps Piaf forgot her as well, but, if she did, she obviously didn’t play as important a part in her life as this film would lead us to believe.

And the only reason the father snatches her away is so that the film can show us how he got her to sing on the streets for money, because after this event is shown, the father is forgotten as well. The singing-for-money bit leads to the scenes of Piaf being “discovered” by nightclub owner Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) while singing for money on the streets of the Pigalle area of Paris. Piaf’s birth name was Edith Giovanna Gassion and it was Leplee who gave her the stage name La Mome Piaf (The Waif Sparrow; in fact, the original title of this film is “La Mome”) The film also haphazardly re-creates Leplee’s mob-related murder and Piaf’s questioning in connection with it, but never in any kind of context. Supposedly, Leplee was shot by gangsters with previous connections to Piaf, but the closest the film ever links Piaf to any “bad-guys” is with a pimp Piaf is working for when she met Leplee. However, his pimp, in real life, was Piaf’s lover at the time. So we get the murder and we get the subsequent questioning of Piaf by the police, but we never understand the “why” of any of it, nor do we learn that Piaf actually stood trial on charges of being an accessory to Leplee’s murder (she was acquitted).

Leplee’s murder and the subsequent trial almost ruined her image in France, so she hired a coach, Raymond Asso (Marc Barbe) to revive her career. It was Asso who changed her stage name from La Mome Piaf to Edith Piaf. The film also claims it was Asso who introduced her to what became her trademark black dresses, when most biographers give Leplee credit for this. We get a brief suggestion that Asso and Piaf were romantically involved, although nothing to show how romantic this affair really was.

Leplee met Piaf in 1935 and he was killed on April 6, 1936, and the film gives no clue there is anything significant happening east of the French borders during this time. So I was anxious to see how the film would show Piaf’s Paris during the German occupation. For some reason, none of this era is depicted. So we don’t see how she discovered Yves Montand (and became his lover) or Charles Aznavour. We don’t see how she openly dated Jewish pianist Norbert Glanzberg during the occupation, how she co-wrote a protest song, “On Sont-Ils Mes Petits Copains” in 1943 and refused Nazi demands she remove it from her concert set lists, or how she posed for photographs with French POWs, photos that were later pasted into passports that allowed many of these Frenchmen to escape. (Interestingly enough, the film never shows Piaf composing anything even though she wrote the song that is this film’s title.)

Instead, the film leaps to the late 1940s and her introduction to American audiences. The film argues that Americans never really “got” Ms. Piaf and she, in turn, despised America and all things American. It is true that her first American tour in 1947 was met with little initial success. Americans wanted to hear upbeat and were not prepared for Piaf’s downbeat, albeit heartfelt, songs. However, at what was supposed to be the end of the tour, she received a glowing review from a critic with the New York Herald Tribune that resulted in a five-month sold-out booking at one of New York City’s premiere nightclubs, two sold out Carnegie Hall concerts and eight appearances on Ed Sullivan’s television show, none of which is depicted in the picture.

Instead, we get the tragic stuff. We meet Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), the world middleweight boxing champion, who is, according to the film, the one great true love of Piaf’s life. According to the film, Cerdan is killed in a plane crash when Piaf begs him to leave Paris and join her in New York. According to everything I have read Cerdan was actually returning for a rematch with Jake LaMotta when his plane crashed, although many believe Piaf may have convinced him to get New York faster by flying instead of taking an ocean liner.

We see the slide caused by her addictions to alcohol and morphine (initially used as a pain-killer following a serious automobile accident in 1951 in which Aznavour was also injured) and only very late in the film do we learn that Piaf, at the age of 17, married a delivery boy and bore him a daughter who died at the age of 2 of meningitis. It never really dwells on the fact that Piaf wantonly and repeatedly cheated on this husband and abandoned their daughter after taking great pains at the beginning of the film to portray Piaf’s own abandonment as a child.

I have spent probably way too much time talking about problems with the screenplay of a film that is ultimately worth seeing because of the aforementioned Cotillard performance, who plays Piaf from her teen-age years to her death at the age of 47. She doesn’t portray Piaf, she becomes Piaf. (Wisely, in all but four instances, the movie uses Piaf’s own recordings for the songs.) I have no knowledge of Cotillard’s physical stature, although she convinces me she is Piaf’s waif-life 4-feet, 8-inches. I feel her pain when she learns of Cerdan’s death and when she is separated from her half-sister and full-time partner Simone Berteaut (Sylvie Testud). I also hated her when she later callously dismissed this woman she called Momone. And I empathized in those recollections she has in a scene the film label’s “Edith’s last night.” You can take this to the bank: Cotillard’s name will be one of the five announced in the leading actress category when the 2007 Academy Award nominees are revealed. It is Cotillard’s virtuoso portrayal that elevates this picture from melodramatic to riveting.

GRADE: B