Schtick & Schlock

Rating: 3/10 (18 June 2007)

Just as there is disappointment when you go to an arena to see a fight and a hockey game breaks out, I went to the Edith Piaf movie, La Vie en Rose, and they showed The Hunchback of Montmartre instead.
Marion Cotillard, portraying the incomparable Piaf, doesn1t recreate the deeply troubled singer1s complexity of emotions, desires and neurosis, she indicates them mostly with a few stock faces and movements. To indicate feelings instead of creating them on camera is like painting by the numbers. The word 3schtick2 comes to mind.
To show Piaf1s bewilderment, disappointment or fleeting joys, for example, Ms. Cotillard indicates it by scrunching up her face. Ms.
Cotillard does a lot of scrunching up of the face, or she indicates it by scrunching up her body into something resembling that of a hunchback. Ms. Cotillard does a lot of that. The result brings to mind, for a mad moment, Charles Laughton in 3The Hunchback of Notre Dame.2 Note to Ms. Cotillard: there1s more to great acting than schrunching and humping.
Director Olivier Dahan, who co-wrote the screenplay as well, is a hack-lifer whose entire oeuvre, at the age of 40, consists of music videos. He shudda stuck to schlock. There isn1t a cliché in the book he overlooks in this confusing mess which defies an audience to understand when most of the events depicted in this sad story are happening to the 3little sparrow2 whose voice could arouse emotions from a block of granite.
Dahan took great pains to make the actress a replica of Piaf whose real voice was lip synched. The physical recreation of Piaf is uncanny superficially, and when the character sings the initial effect is extraordinary, but the performer on camera doesn1t have the x-factor of recreating Piaf1s artistry and communication with her audiences. Piaf, like the other great ones, had the power to transform an audience into a kind of mystical realm of uniting mind and soul into a single, collective entity, turning the audience into a part of the performer herself, seemingly feeling what she feels at that very moment. Audience knowledge of French isn1t essential for that, but the mysterious x-factor is, and Ms. Cotillard, for all her efforts, doesn1t have it.
Would any actress working now? Probably not. Most critics, it seems, have already awarded Ms. Cotillard the Oscar for best actress. Quel crazy.
Every scene in 3La Vie en Rose2 is a cliché, like similar scenes in most of the other bio pics, excepting 3Ray2, with nary a trace of originality even though the singer1s desperately sad life and artistry cries out for something new and different. A cruel irony that a hack director presented the story of a great artist whose work is just as thrilling and deeply moving now as it was all those decades ago.