La Vie En Rose, a French biopic of singer Édith Piaf, scales the hill of tragedy and almost tumbles into the valley of comedy. It’s just that much of a bummer; what a life she led.
Left for dead by an indifferent mother, she’s raised by prostitutes and nearly blinded by an infection. She falls in with a pimp who threatens to make her turn tricks if she doesn’t bring in enough scratch from her street-corner singing gigs; her father, a failing circus performer who sees Édith as his way out, doesn’t treat her much better. At the start of her rise to fame, she’s mentored by a nightclub owner with mafia connections. In a moment that would make Shakespeare smile, the love of her life is killed, unintentionally, by her own behest. She can’t break through in America although she was (and perhaps remains) France’s greatest pop star. Addictions to drugs, alcohol, her own legend, questionable taste in friends and an unstoppable belief that the show must go on all exacerbate her descent to a pitifully early death. Only when she sings is she, and the movie, glorious.
As Édith, Marion Cotillard, only 32 years old, deserves an Academy nod for playing a woman that ages remarkably from a fidgety, wide-eyed ingénue who fits her stage name perfectly—piaf is French for sparrow—to a hunched, near Norma Desmond type. And the look of the film itself is sumptuous and hyperreal, staged like the melodrama it nearly is.
I didn’t know enough of Piaf to pay respects at her grave at Père Lachaise when I was in Paris in 2004. But non, je ne regrette rien; next time.