La Vie en Rose (2007)

Directed by: Olivier Dahan
Starring: Marion Cotillard

**1/2

La Vie en Rose is a biopic about the life and times of an apparently very famous singer name Edith Piaf. Like any biopic, this film has happiness and it has sadness. It has life and death. It has tragedy and love, successes and failures, uprises, downfalls, the overcoming of obstacles but mostly, it has a main character on which it relies fully as it leaves all other characters like dust in the wind. Like Jamie Foxx in Ray, like Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, La Vie en Rose would be more aptly titled, the Marion Cotillard Show.

Unlike biopics such as Ray and Walk the Line however, La Vie en Rose surrounds a character who's life is much lesser known, at least perhaps in American and at the very least to me. So seeing her story was a bit more of an interesting side note to Cotillard's performance. It wasn't however, easy or entertaining.

At times, Edith Piaf is a real bitch. At other times, you couldn't possibly feel worse for her. Assuming accuracy, the film shows that Piaf had a very tough life. As a child, she panhandled for both of her parents. She lived with her grandmother in a brothel. She nearly went blind from Keratitis, however, as a child, she got her first opportunity to showcase her ability to sing. From there she went through the somewhat typical biopic up rise to success.

When I wasn't struggling to follow the timeline, I was recognizing that Piaf's life would have been much more sympathetic were it not for the chronological jumps throughout the film. There seemed to be no apparent consistency to the decision to go from Piaf as a child to Piaf in her early forties, back to being a child, to her late forties, to her twenties to her early forties again then back to being a child. All this really did was create confusion in the mind of an audience member. The end does reveal a half hearted twist that somewhat suggests a reason for the style of storytelling but neither the twist itself or that reason really win me over.

As for Cotillard... As one would expect, she is brilliant. I don't need to know anything about Piaf to know that Cotillard completely transformed herself to bring Piaf back to life. She was unquestionably deserving of her Oscar. When I finally reached a point of realization that I couldn't come up with any logical reason for the films chronology, I began to focus in on Cotillard and really appreciated the fact that not only was she brilliant but she was in all two hours and twenty minutes of this film. To sit back and marvel at that was not nearly as challenging as getting through the rest of the film.

Saying the film was challenging to get through is not to say that it wasn't good. That criticism is mostly based on the fact that the character, often times was not very likable. The film was too long as all biopics are and again, the timeline caused confusion. These elements aside however, Piaf's life is interesting enough to share. Whether I got a good impression of how her life went or if I just saw how she acted and behaved, remains unsolved.