La Vie en Rose

PULLING NUMBERS

Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose (also known as La Môme) is a collection of biographical showpieces about dwarfy Edith Piaf and it's compelling for the reason Love in the Time of Cholera isn't—the makeup. Covering 50% of Marion Cotillard's portrayal as the singer, the Oscar-wining cosmetics by Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibold are not only persuasive in getting us to accept her as Piaf, they're also marvels of transitions: it's next to impossible not to believe it when at only 47 she's on her death bed. 25% of the performance is in the lip-synching of songs and sound design augmenting them; the synchronizing of the lips, the music and the technical integrity of the enhancements combine to make a virtuoso form of synthesis. If we're always aware that Patsy Cline's recording are being synched by Jessica Lange in Sweet Dreams, by end we nevertheless surrender to her as Cline because of her enormous likability. Here, we only briefly compare Cotillard's efforts to Piaf but even more quickly give in to what we're watching because it's as if Piaf has come back to do a return engagement to revel in her drama queen life, which is the remaining 25% of the tribute. And likely the cause of trouble for those who've walked out on the movie. Some of the scenes have an “Oh, God, wait'll you hear what she did last night!” lowdown about them and therefore difficult to know if they really happened: throwing some coins at her destitute drunk of a mother in a small café, Cotillard's Edith has the moral right to spit anger yet she seems to want to escalate the humiliation. It's one of too many episodes that have a willful capriciousness; this movie Piaf, excessively resembling a bug-eyed emotional retard out of a Margaret Keane caricature, really enjoys pulling one number after another. The major showcase eruption happens in Piaf's apartment when she learns the fate of her lover, the married Marcel (played with attractive studliness by Jean-Pierre Martins). The sequence has all the fulsome theatrics of a long uninterrupted tracking shot, capturing the high of idyllic love, then the low of sudden tragedy, then to the embrace of a loving audience as a fix for pain; not far from a soap opera aria, it's a consummate bit of trash. Upsetting to many is the non-linear approach to what is undeniably a sketchy bio: the flashbacks and flash forwards tend to confuse our sense of the timing of and who the participants are in events. And at 140 minutes, not every lover or factoid could be included: Yves Montand, for instance, is all but ignored, and there's zilch on Piaf's elusive role in the French Resistance. Neither omission objectionable, particularly the later: Piaf as the prima donna French chanteuse was no less morally duplicitous of supposed patriotism than her fellow countrymen during WWII. Rather quietly Montand is nevertheless represented: his stepdaughter, Catherine Allégret, playing Piaf's grandmother Louise, has the ravaged face and physique of her mother Simone Signoret.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com