good film, great performance

Rating: 8/10 (6 April 2008)

"La Vie en Rose" is the highly acclaimed biopic of Edith Piaf, France's most famed chantreuse, who died in 1963 at the tragically young age of forty-seven. With a childhood worthy of a Dickensian waif (ripped away from her alcoholic mother and raised in a brothel), Piaf began at an early age singing for her supper on street corners, first with her unemployed father then with a close girlfriend by the name of Momone. It didn't take long for Piaf's talent to be "discovered," and she was soon performing in cabarets and nightclubs, eventually achieving stardom on an international scale before the age of thirty. But, as appears to be the case with virtually all successful artists, Piaf waged a lifelong battle against a whole host of personal demons, prime among them booze, an addiction to pain killers, and an undying love for a man she could never fully have (the married boxer Marcel Cerdan). And, again, as with so many artists, Piaf suffered from that paradoxical combination of raging egotism and massive insecurities, resulting in a high-strung, temperamental personality that served to drive even her closest companions away at times when she needed them most.
For the first hour-and-a-half or so, "La Vie en Rose" is an impressively mounted but relatively conventional and undistinguished biography, charting the rise and fall of its subject though a complex (though occasionally rather confusing) crazy quilt of flashbacks and flash-forwards. But in the story's final act, as Piaf moves inexorably closer to the end of her life, the movie becomes a deeply moving and heartbreaking study of a talented woman brought down by the cruelties of fate (she suffered from crippling arthritis) and her own self-inflicted wounds.
Clearly, the chief selling-point of "La Vie en Rose," written by Isabelle Sobelman and Olivier Dahan and directed by Dahan, is the stunning tour de force (and Oscar-winning) performance by Marion Cotillard, who inhabits the character so completely that we truly feel we are watching Edith Piaf herself in the flesh (an illusion enhanced by the filmmakers' reliance on actual Piaf recordings for the singing). Cotillard goes from portraying a budding and spirited young woman learning to survive on the streets to a decrepit old woman whose body has betrayed her - all without missing a beat. She is particularly impressive in the latter stages of the movie as Piaf, after years of illness and addiction, seems to wither away before our very eyes. Special kudos must also go to make-up artists Jan Archibald, Didier Lavergne, Matthew Smith and David White for some of the most impressive aging work I have ever seen on screen.
The film itself approaches greatness only near the end, but Cotillard's performance is genuinely great throughout.