La Vie En Rose (2007)

Here’s how much I knew about French singer Edith Piaf before watching La Vie En Rose, the 2007 movie about her life: doodly-squat. And here’s how much I know after watching it: almost doodly-squat. This is one of the least factually informative “bio-pics” I’ve seen. I’m not being mean here: that’s a description of style, not quality. La Vie En Rose does a remarkable thing: it doesn’t so much look at a “life story” as simply at a life. If you want story, hit the library for books about Piaf. This is a movie of impressions.

Piaf’s father was a soldier who, before the first World War broke out, was a circus acrobat. Her mother was…a woman who thought she could sing. She couldn’t. She goes broke, and the father returns from war to pluck young Edith out of poverty to live with his own mother, a brothel-owner. Later, she lives with her father in the circus. Turns out, unlike her mom, Edith can sing, and can make money at it. So she does, first for her father, then for a pimp, then for managers. Some, she keeps for herself. She is famous. She has lovers. Her health fails and she grows addicted to various drugs to stop crippling arthritis pain. Eventually, as we all must do, she dies.

Such, I gather, is the outline of her life. But it is almost secondary in this movie. The movie instead lingers over moments and aspects: the doting care of the whores in her grandmother’s brothel; Edith’s confusion when an early benefactor is murdered by criminals; Edith’s vision, as a young girl, of Saint Therese, who says she watches over her. And, of course, the music. Piaf had quite a voice in her tiny, often bent body, and the film lets us hear it. Physically, she is embodied for the majority of the film by Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her efforts. Her Piaf is by turns feisty, afraid, stupid, savvy, endearing, and annoying. The performance is seamless. Had I seen this movie on its release, I might have dismissed it. But having first seen Cotillard as herself, and as a tough gangster’s moll in Public Enemies, it becomes clear how much artistry was needed to turn graceful, willowy Cotillard into fragile, arthritic Piaf (Cotillard does not, however, do the singing: you hear Piaf’s own voice). Supporting players are a mixed bag. Emmanuelle Seigner is heartbreaking as the whore who largely “adopts” young Edith, only to lose her, and Sylvie Testud is memorable as Edith’s long-time, tough-as-nails best friend Momone. Gerard Depardieu, for all his physical presence, hardly registers as an ill-fated nightclub owner.

The movie flashes back and forward somewhat, which tends toward confusion. Characters come and go without clear identification, or even sometimes resolution. And yet, by the end, it makes a kind of sense. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button used as its tagline Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. That movie didn’t deserve that tagline (not least because the whole premise is that Button does live backward). This one does. The final 15 minutes or so masterfully weave together one of Edith’s last public performances, her death and deathbed recollections, and a slightly earlier event where a young woman interviews Piaf with something like a version of “the Proust Questionnaire.” No coincidence, that: Proust was also French, and also knew something about looking backward at life. The movie lets these events comment on each other: things Piaf says in the interview recall events the dying Piaf remembers, which in turn fit with the notes of her singing. Some scenes recap what we have seen, others introduce new information. We learn, for example, that as a young woman, Piaf had a child, which died. Other movies would have made Freudian hay of this from the start. But the real Piaf did not reveal this to many people, and so the film withholds it as well.

And this is exactly right. We do not understand life forward. People do not walk into our lives with handy labels like “future spouse” or “career-changing expert.” Labels like that happen, and we apply them later, as needed. Nor do we know the ends of all the paths that cross ours. All biographies are constructs, and this movie understands that. It does a better job of any biography film I’ve seen, with the possible exception of A Beautiful Mind, of getting inside its subject’s head—both for good and ill. Piaf’s head was not, it seems, always a pleasant place to be. But it is where we must go to understand her life.

I’m supposed to be writing about a movie here, but I keep wanting to write about time and memory instead. That’s what La Vie En Rose made me think of, more than of Edith Piaf herself. While the movie contains its share of beautiful and wry moments (When, at the height of her career, her manager chides Piaf for holding up an appointment to let an amateur composer play her a new song, she replies, “What is the point of being ‘Edith Piaf’ if I can’t do this??”), I admired it in the end more for its artistry than its entertainment value, and some early parts are indeed tough going. It is an odd film, to be sure, but its differences are just as much virtues as flaws. American-made bio-pics, in any case, seem to be slumping of late (the recent Amelia was lamented as competent but soulless), and this offering from a couple of years ago and across an ocean provides a refreshing alternative to formula.