La Mme, Marion Cotillard's Colorful Portrayal of Edith Piaf's Vie en Rose
Certain French stereotypes refuse to die.
For example: they all love Jerry Lewis.
(French people under the age of 60 have no idea who he is.)
Mimes everywhere.
(France has been mime-free for at least 20 years.)
The men all wear berets.
(You'll see a hundred New York Yankees caps here before you see a man wearing a beret.)
One more: wherever you go, Edith Piaf's hauntingly beautiful La Vie en Rose' plays in the background.
The quintessential French ballad, which translates roughly as My Life in Pink', that Piaf wrote in 1945 may not be as ubiquitous as it was in post-war France, but thanks to a new film about her life, that song and others to which she gave life have seen a popular resurgence.
Olivier Dahan's La Mme, starring Marion Cotillard as Piaf, is a much-anticipated love song to the legendary songstress.
Cotillard, who played a poignant supporting role in Tim Burton's Big Fish, slips her 5'6" body into Piaf's 4'8" frame and gets lost among the layers.
In Cotillard's Piaf, the viewer sees a timid girl who speaks the slurred, sometimes wholly inarticulate Parigot' patois of the streets, yet can light up a stage with a richly inimitable, emotive voice.
Cotillard carries the film, aided by a solid supporting cast, including Grard Depardieu (nearly as much as a French clich as mimes and berets, but still a formidable actor) and newcomer Pauline Burlet, who plays a 10-year-old Piaf and nearly steals the show in a scene where she discovers her voice for the first time on the streets of Paris, singing a soulful, impromptu version of La Marseillaise to rapt passers-by.
An icon in France even more than 40 years after her death, Edith Giovanna Gassion was born in the slums of Belleville, in Paris, in 1915.
Her childhood and adolescence reads like something out of Les Misrables:
Abandoned by her crazy mother.
Partially raised by her paternal grandmother, who ran a brothel in Normandy.
Reunited with her father, a street contortionist in Paris.
Started singing on the streets as part of her father's act.
Discovered by a rich cabaret owner.
That cabaret owner, Louis Leple (Depardieu in the movie), turned the little street waif into La Mme Piaf', which translates into The Sparrow Kid'.
While her nickname sounds like something more suitable for a featherweight boxer, she became an instant success in 1930s Paris.
Then, just as soon as she had reached the top, her life came crashing down again, with the murder of her mentor Leple, for which she was questioned by the police.
Though she was found to have nothing to do with the crime, she was booed off Paris stages, and her short career appeared over.
She eventually reinvented herself as Edith Piaf, and the rest of her life was La Vie en Rose'.
Hardly.
While she did put herself back in the good graces of the French public, her private life was frequently in shambles.
Plagued by alcoholism, morphine addiction, and the accidental deaths of two lovers, the tiny sparrow seemed continuously tossed by the winds of misfortune.
Cotillard, whose tear-filled eyes and trembling lip sing nearly as profoundly as Piaf's voice, is the vessel who carries this film through the chaos that was Dahan's choppy directing.
Perhaps it was Dahan's desire to demonstrate the tumultuous nature of Piaf's life by playing with the timeline and jerking the viewer from pre-WWII to post-WWII to the 60s and back to the 30s, but if that was his goal, it only served to confuse.
There were times when one was left wondering, Okay, which lover is that? What year is it now? Is she addicted to morphine right now, or is she just drunk again?'
Definitely the film's only weakness, the back and forth through the decades of Piaf's life leaves one bleary-eyed after 140 minutes, one's brain taxed from trying to assimilate the myriad entourage members, friends, lovers, mentors, writers and musicians that came and went over her 47 years.
In all of his mixed-up meanderings, he also seemed to forget the entire Second World War, which is only mentioned when a soldier parting for the front writes a song for Piaf.
Interestingly, since Dahan neglected to really show much of anything from the decade of the 40s, he therefore failed to touch on how Piaf not only provided help to the Resistance movement during the Nazi Occupation, but also didn't bother to tell the story of her most famous song, La Vie en Rose', which she wrote just after the war ended.
While certainly there was a lot to cover in a retelling of La Mme's life, it just doesn't seem right that he left out such key elements of her story.
There was also the rather lame insertion of a scene just at the end of the movie which showed a young Piaf's only child die of meningitis.
But this scene, which could have been a powerful one, was thrown into a sort of life flashing before her eyes' moment before she dies, and it just came across as weirdly misplaced.
Despite some poor directorial decisions, the film is a success, thanks to Cotillard's commitment to showing a French heroine in all her colors.