la vie en rouge

Rating: 7/10 (3 January 2008)

This is one of those French movies that mistakes style for grace. No doubt, it is beautifully and imaginatively shot. But, while purportedly a biography of Edith Piaf, the film makes seemingly arbitrary choices about content, except for the obvious decision to include only incidents which were miserable, degrading, or horrific. The movie also robs itself of nearly every possible dramatic revelation by telling the story out of sequence and out of logic. Of course, linear structure is only one sort, but it's the sort that requires the least of the writer, director, and audience. Either music video and cheap thriller director Olivier Dahan is out of his depth, or I am out of mine, in LA MOME.
Regardless, the show isn't the movie, it's Marion Cotillard as Piaf, and she's not wrong about any of it. She's great. A single shot of her face, happy/sad/mad/drunk or anything else, is enough to fix pretty much all the problems her director and writers have failed to solve on their own. Her walk, her talk, her singing, her gestures, all are perfectly convincing. I haven't seen enough of her work to know whether this is an outrageously happy marriage of actor and character, or whether she is, as she seems to be, a talent of the first rank.