LA VIE EN ROSE (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Olivier Dahan
Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Clotilde Courau,
Pascal Greggory, Emmanuelle Seigner, Gerard Depardieu
Ernest Hemingway once said of Marlene Dietrich that if she had nothing but her voice, she could break your heart with it. Dietrich, played by look-alike actress Caroline Sihol, makes a brief appearance in "La Vie en Rose", turning up to pay her respects to another 20th-century icon, the French singer Edith Piaf. The movie tells Piaf's life story in fragments, skipping around in time, from the streets of Paris late in World War One to Piaf's death in 1963. It looks real good, and Dahan makes some interesting choices along the way, but the portrait that emerges is never much more than the sum of its parts. The supporting characters don't register very strongly - you don't even know who some of them are - and it's not till a deathbed flashback in the last reel that you learn Piaf once had a young husband and a kid. Missing entirely is any mention of World War Two, which Piaf spent living above a brothel in occupied Paris. The extent to which she may or may not have collaborated with the Germans has stirred speculation and controversy over the years, and seems to be a place the French still don't want to go. It's a glaring omission. But Piaf's the role of a lifetime for any French actress, and Marion Cotillard, who played Russell Crowe's love interest in "A Good Year", doesn't waste the chance. With her stooped, birdlike body language, Cotillard makes herself small, and she seems to be living her character's shifting moods and contradictions, from the temperamental diva to the fun-loving party girl to the tough street survivor who melts into a rapturous grin whenever she's with her great love, the boxer Marcel Cerdan. Whatever you think of the rest of the movie, you won't forget Cotillard's performance anytime soon. And there's all that great music to listen to. If anybody could break your heart with her voice, it was Edith Piaf.
