Blogical Conclusion

IT’S A (MOSTLY) WONDERFUL LIFE

MAY 11, 2008 - OVER THE YEARS, AND ESPECIALLY DURING OSCAR SEASON, we’ve gotten used to rags-to-riches, footpath-to-fame biopics of American musicians, but La Vie En Rose is absolutely, entirely, completely different: it’s the rags-to-riches, footpath-to-fame biopic of a French musician, the legendary Edith Piaf. (That qualifier notwithstanding, the first time I heard Piaf was in Saving Private Ryan, when a song of hers wafted over the smog and the silence during a respite before the climactic battle, when the scholarly Corporal Upham – so marvellously played by Jeremy Davies – translated its lyrics to the rest of his unit.) Piaf’s story has to be seen to be believed – or rather, if you didn’t see it, if you didn’t know that all of this really happened, you wouldn’t believe a second of it. We’ve all heard – or have been consoled by – that cliché about God opening a window when he closes a door, but when it comes to people like Piaf, His policy seems to have been more along the lines of opening for them a great door (to fame, to fortune), allowing them entry into the kind of hallowed, rarefied space that you or I can only dream about, and then shutting all the windows, one by one. First success, then suffocation – that appears to be His plan, the price for experiencing more joys than most mortals being the commensurate experience of more sorrows.

And in the case of Piaf, what sorrows they were. She was snatched away from an alcoholic mother by an acrobat father who dumped her in his mother’s brothel, and later dragged the child away kicking and screaming after she’d formed a bond with a maternal prostitute (but not before she underwent a period of temporary blindness). She was taken to a circus where she was cursed at, and once that ordeal got over, she was taken to the streets to (literally) sing for her supper and fork over her earnings to a pimp. Her benefactor Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) was murdered. When she finally found the love of her life, he turned out to be a married man, who died soon after in a plane crash. She battled booze addiction, an unhealthy morphine dependency, liver cancer and the death of a child, along with onstage collapses and at least a couple of car accidents. How do you say phew in French? It’s hardly the ideal pickup at the end of a long day, but the reason I finally caught up with La Vie En Rose – other than the fact that I pretty much watch everything – is that Marion Cotillard (who plays Piaf) scored an upset win at the Oscars this year over Julie Christie (who was widely touted as the front-runner for Best Actress, for Away From Her.)

I haven’t seen Away From Her, so I can’t say if Cotillard deserved her Academy Award over Christie – Wikipedia tells me she’s the first person to ever win one for a performance entirely in French – but there’s little doubt she deserved some sort of recognition for meticulously crafting a full-blooded, sympathetic character out of outlines that could just as easily have been shaped into a stereotypical showbiz monster. This is one of those performances tailor-made for derision as “chewing up the scenery,” but that would be completely inaccurate in a sense. The scenery is merely the appetiser, after which Cotillard works her way through the props and the supporting cast and layers and layers of old-age makeup, and washes it all down with the large glasses of wine she’s constantly guzzling on screen. And the amazing thing is that it actually works. It works because it’s an outsized performance in an outsized movie. The writer-director Olivier Dahan knows he’s got a rather predictable dramatic arc, so he slices up his story and rearranges the pieces in a non-linear fashion, so what you get isn’t a sustained psychological portrait of Piaf so much as snapshots that reveal – despite the occasional frustration about what’s really going on – how the melodrama of her life informed the melodrama of her music.

If you’re looking, for instance, for the reason Leplée is murdered, La Vie En Rose isn’t about to give you one – because all you need to know is that Piaf used to love this man, this father-figure she called Papa Leplée, and now he’s been cruelly snuffed out, and worse, the cops and the press are hounding her, so cue yet another eddy in the whirlpool that was her existence. What kept her from being sucked under was, of course, the music – and yet, we don’t hear her sing the first time she performed in the theatre, the first time her talent was showcased for the kind of audience whose adulation would eventually elevate her to a national icon. (Her earlier shows were in two-bit nightclubs, where – much like the fate that befell Liza Minnelli’s showgirl in Cabaret – the incandescence of her gifts couldn’t peek through the dingy gloom of her surroundings.) Piaf shuffles on stage, in the blinding spotlight, her hands locked behind, like a nervous schoolgirl’s, and when she finally breaks into full-throated song, it’s as if she’s a mime. Her lips move, her throat warbles – but all we hear are the gentle notes from a piano glazed with swirls from an accordion, rising and falling and underlining the swells of emotion in an enraptured audience. It’s the first time Piaf is feeling the words she’s singing – so far, she’s been merely a technical virtuoso, a brassy belter of tunes – and Dahan shows us that what she’s singing, now, has been eclipsed by how she’s singing it. It’s a beautiful moment that tells us how talent met technique that night in Paris, how Piaf finally found her one joy that would tide her through life’s sorrows.

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