La Vie en Rose

One of the thrills of any trip to Paris is a stop at the Olympia, famed musical home not only of Edith Piaf but also several of her protégés, including Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour, and Gilbert Becaud. La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan's cinematic bio-tribute to France's famous "Little Sparrow," takes us from the mean streets of her childhood to the pinnacles of her success--not only at the Olympia but also at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Yet it doesn't bother to mention her grand amour with Montand, nor her last husband, Theo Lamboukas, who was 20 years her junior and who was with her at the time of her death, nor for that matter does it even cover WWII, when Piaf was so revered by the French resistance.

The film leaves out so much, compacts so many figures in her life into types, and jumps back and forth in time in such a fragmented way that unless one already knows something about La Mome's all-too-short life, one comes away with only the most superficial facts: rags to riches, monstrously talented, unlucky in love, an alcoholic drug addict, painful illnesses, early death--facts that also pertain to Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, the two American divas whose lives strongly parallel Piaf's. LVER is more France's answer to Lady Sings the Blues than Ray.

That said, no more caveats! With all its flaws, it's still a great time at the movies, filled with colorful sweeps of melodramatic moments and that glorious music, guaranteed to bring tears of joy and sorrow. First and foremost LVER is Cotillard, Cotillard, Cotillard!  A full head taller than Piaf and much prettier, she is nonetheless compelling as the tiny singer in a "warts and all" performance that knocks our socks off.

But Dahan also provides Gerard Depardieu as her discoverer, while introducing several other great French actors to a broader worldwide audience. Sylvie Testud plays Piaf's childhood sidekick, Emanuelle Seignier is the soft-hearted tart who tries to mother her, Pascal Greggory is her long- suffering manager, and Jean-Pierre Martins appears as the boxer Marcel Cerdan, her one true love.

Marion Cottillard's Piaf will surely be up against Angelina Jolie's Marianne Pearl for this year’s Academy Award--two examples of extraordinary incarnations of real people. Both are on a par with Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote, Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth, Forest Whittaker's Idi Amin, and Jamie Foxx's Ray Charles.  But each of those portrayals occurred in far better films than LVER. As the 2000's increasingly become the biopic decade, the world is turning to film and theater rather than to literature for information about who we are and were. And there's still Janis, Sammy, and Frost/Nixon to look forward to.

                                                       Leslie (Hoban) Blake