La Vie En Rose

Presented in London on Thursday as the opening night of the just-wrapped mini film festival A Rendez-Vous With French Cinema, La Vie En Rose is Olivier Dahan’s biopic of legendary singer Edith Piaf. Following on from breakout US hits Ray and Walk The Line, the time might be judged propitious for a warts-and-all melodrama about the wrong-side-of-the-tracks singer who grew up in a brothel, suffered temporary blindness as a child, and went on to grow a dependency on the morphine that was prescribed to her after a car crash.

Anchoring the film is a truly impressive performance by Marion Cotillard (A Good Year), who plays Piaf from a teenager hustling for coins on the pavement to an arthritic grouch who died of cancer in 1963, evidently much more decrepit than her 48 years would suggest.

Supporting Cotillard is a large ensemble cast, including Gerard Depardieu as the nightclub owner who discovered her, Louis Leplée. So dominant is her personality, and so discursive Dahan’s narrative, few of the subsidiary characters make too strong an impression. Exceptions are Piaf’s one true love, boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), and prostitute Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner), who early on becomes Edith’s surrogate mother and is devastated when the child’s circus contortionist father shows up to reclaim her. Titine, however, is an invented character.

The film shuttles back and forth in time, without an abundance of date captions, thus commanding full engagement from audiences that want to keep up. Judging by reviews following the film’s Berlin Film Festival premiere in February (Variety gave it a rave), as well as healthy box-office receipts in territories where it’s already playing, the trick seems to have worked. La Vie en Rose opens in the UK on June 22, distributed by Icon Pictures.

Trailer on YouTube:

What others are saying:
http://www.cinemattraction.com/
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/02/08/berlinale-review-la-vie-en-rose/

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