The Emotional Story of a Sparrow of Ill Omen...

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2015)

There's a French expression to describe an abrupt and disconcerting shift between two opposite emotions, it's "emotional elevator". Well, as far as emotionality goes, Olivier Dahan's "Le Vie en Rose" doesn't feel like an elevator, but like Russian mountains, so exhaustive it transcends the 'biopic' format. We don't discover the life of Edith Piaf, but her feelings, through her songs, her tragic love stories, and naturally, through Mation Cotillard's extraordinary performance, that swept away (and deservingly so) all the major acting awards in 2008.
What a performance indeed, so intense and heart breaking, I kept on questioning myself, on which field Edith Piaf was the better at: singing or loving? "Love, just love", she said, to an interviewer's question on the most important thing in life. And she would never have been half the artist she was if she didn't inject the very passion that drove her short life. She celebrates her centenary today, but she didn't live half of it, yet her legacy is immense. She's still the artist with this loud, powerful and clear voice, this giant of French music, despite her being two inches shy of five feet. But the loving and beloved singer had too gigantic a heart in such a small frame.
Yet that voice, that diction that she learned the hard way, and allowed her to sublimate the alliterative "Non Je ne Regrette Rien" testimonial song ('I Regret Nothing') transcended her frail body, as if all the strength Edith was blessed of was in that heart, and the voice that expressed it. When Edith sung, everyone was silent, because you can't listen to anything else when she sings, except the beating of your own heart, or an inner voice humming "La Foule", "Milord" or "Padam" melodies. Like love, singing is all a matter of communication and that's what Edith Piaf knew the best, communicate her feelings. And Dahan's gutsy directing knew how to communicate this ability.
There's a very well directed scene where Edith Piaf is about to perform her first song at the Olympia (Bruno Coquatrix's emblematic music-hall that she would miraculously resurrect in the early 60's, at the expenses of her health). Edith is first stricken by stage fear, literally frozen, then she goes and what happens is similar to the moment where she sung 'La Marseillaise' after her father's sidewalk number failed. It's a revelation, and from that moment, a star is born. And this epiphany is simply magical, we don't hear the singing; it's all expressed through Cotillard's gracious and poignant body language, and surprisingly, we feel the music. It's as simple as that.
This moment allows Marion Cotillard to showcase her talent and push it into higher and higher summits. She's not just impersonating a singer, she's not just lip-synching, she just totally dissolved herself into Edith Piaf. Rarely has there been female performance that met with such unanimous critical acclaim and for reasons. Cotillard makes you feel the exhilaration and pain for having entrapped her soul into such a larger-than-life character, a person whose infinite capability of lovingness ultimately destroyed her. And one scene captures this tragedy, the scene that probably locked Cotillard's chances to win the Oscar, and the other awards.
Edith Piaf had many lovers, but one stood above the others and formed a legendary pairing, as he was a legend in his own field, boxing. His name was Marcel Cerdan. The day before his untimely death, Piaf is in a state of grace, the culmination of her happy days, but she's a vehicle of emotions that can only be fueled by love, and she needs her Marcel so badly she implores him to take the plane. The morning after, her friends come with bad news. Of course, I'm not sure it happened just as the movie suggests; with the first hallucination of Marcel coming back, but that long shot covers a wide range of emotion, stages of grief escalating, to culminate with her heart-wrenching cries and ending with her iconic tribute to the man she loved the most, the "Hymn to Love".
That four-minute shot encapsulates Piaf's life was about: a few moments of joie de vivre meant to end as tragedies. So much for 'la Vie en Rose'! From her raising by a singing prostitute Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) and the devastating way, her father (Jean-Paul Rouve) snatches her away, from her miraculous encounter with Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) while singing in a street with her friend Momone (Sylvie Testud) to the assassination of this man, the one she owed everything to, starting with her "little sparrow" nickname. And the sparrow became the bird of ill omen held responsible for Leplee's death. Edith Piaf was a carousel of contradictions.
It's extraordinary that such an immense artist never had a biopic, but I think I can figure out why. First of all, her life was so emotionally rich that even watching a documentary about Edith Piaf is enough to make your heart melt. And to play Edith Piaf, one must be pretty sure of his casting. Cotillard is nowhere near 4 feet 8, her beauty is more Hollywood-like than Edith yet she was so intense, so excessively passionate that she became Edith, it took the greatest actress to play the greatest singer. And Cotillard was born to play it. Speaking of birth, she named her son with Guillaume Canet, Marcel, as to keep something of Piaf's sparkle forever connected with her life.
Of course, there are many chapters missing from Piaf's life, but it's just like the film embodied the tragedy of a woman too frail to carry such a gigantic heart, even a movie couldn't contain all the emotionality that cemented the tragedy of Edith Piaf. So, as Edith Piaf would say, there's nothing to regret, the film is as great as it is. And it has almost everything to do with Mation Cotillard's performance.