La Vie en Rose (2007)

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This is a biopic of Édith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) told in a non-linear manner. The movie starts with her collapsing during a 1959 New York performance. She is a young girl crying in the streets of 1918 Paris. Her father is away at war and her singing mother abandons her. He returns home to take the sick Édith away to his mother who runs a brothel in Normandy. She is befriended by maternal hooker Titine. His father returns again to take her away to work in the circus. They quit the circus and she starts singing in the streets. Nightclub owner Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) hires her giving her the name Piaf until his murder. This is a low point as the public turns against her and she is forced into a convent by her mother. Next, she is in post-war New York falling for boxer Marcel Cerdan. It is a troubled exuberant life of ups and downs.Marion Cotillard is incredibly powerful acting this wild life. She delivers on every point. It's a masterful performance. The movie itself is a long-running biopic. The story isn't able to distill into a simple idea. It's a lot of sections and vignettes. The most controversial and powerful should be her years in occupied Europe working under Nazi rule. Oddly, the movie seems to skip over that important part of her life. Maybe, there are uncomfortable rumors that the movie refuses to touch. Overall, Cotillard is so powerful that any problems fade into the background.

The recent biopics of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles were quite well done, but at times it felt as if you could superimpose them over each other scene for scene. The problem is that each film tried to tell an essentially uplifting story of hard beginnings, super-stardom, setbacks and ultimate triumph, with great songs emerging as an expression of personal struggle. But there's just not that much drama in a tale of a talented rich person nearly (but not quite) screwing up, and emerging better for the experience, so once the initial breakthrough has occurred, the rest of the movies are just illustrated documentary. 'La Vie En Rose', the story of Edith Piaff, is a bit different, even though it also uses the "song as expression of self" trope. This is because Piaff, while she also came from a poor background and struggled with drugs, ultimately didn't have a happy ending: she died young, prematurely aged. Also, as the film tells it, she was a strong, tempestuous and difficult woman, someone who lived her wealth and fame as if it might be taken from her at any moment, a form of behaviour that was sadly self-fulfilling. Marion Cotillard plays this troubled soul with some brilliance, from street gamine to ailing diva. Piaff's music is at one level unsubtle, and its rarely heard in the modern world. But even if you're more partial to rock-and-roll, hers is the more compelling story.

La Mome is one of the greatest non-us films in the decade.It is about the life of one of the greatest French singers Edith Piaf portrayed by a very talented and very beautiful woman named Marion Cotillard.Of course other great French actors play such as Gerard Departieu,Emmanuelle Seigner,Sylvie Testud and many others.The film starts and ends with the same scene,showing Edith Piaf sining on stage.It starts from the age of 9 where she was raised in her Grandma's house and then later at a circus where by accidentally she finds out her secret gift her voice.Then we see her in the 30s and 40s how she developed as an artist,her great love that she never managed to see,her daughter who died very young and her deal she had with cancer which in the end it killed her.The last scene she is shown performing the beautiful song ''Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien'' in my opinion one of her greatest songs.Excellent film i do not wonder why it won so many awards with top the two winning academy awards for best acting role for Marion Cotillard and best make-up.This film truly shows what the European Cinema can achieve.

I have long heard of this film, since it had won the Oscar Best Actress prize for lead actress Marion Cotillard for her total embodiment of the central character, French singer Edith Piaf. Oddly though, I never really got to watch this movie until now. It was only because I had just seen an amazing stage production called "Piaf," a play written by Pam Gems in 1978. This play introduced me to Piaf as a most dramatic and tragic character. I felt compelled to finally watch this movie "La Vie en Rose" and compare notes.Thankfully for the play, I was able to get the flow of the whole story, despite the technique employed by the film director Olivier Dahan of telling her story non-linearly, in erratic flashbacks. Some of the flashbacks would inexplicably merge into main story which may confuse a lot of viewers who have no knowledge of Piaf's life story. If you knew how the story goes in the first place though, his story telling style choices may actually come across as artistic. Unlike the play, this movie tells a lot about Edith's sad and eventful childhood. This part of her life would include interesting tidbits about being in the circus, as well as going blind with her sight restored by what seemed to be a miracle by her patroness Therese of the Child Jesus. These details of course was beyond the scope of the play. The play though spent significant time to tell about Piaf's activities during World War II, as well as about her second and last husband, Theo Sarapo. The latter was mentioned in passing by Piaf on her deathbed. On the other hand, the film totally skipped these two important episodes of Piaf's checkered life.But both in the movie and play, the music of Piaf is front and center. In the film, while Marion Cotillard perfected the stance, facial expression and gestures of Piaf, she only lip-synched to the original recordings or recordings done by a sound-alike. The stage Piaf though had to sing LIVE with bravura with every performance. The final song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" was a truly a spectacular showstopper in both film and play as sung in French. However the film thankfully had English subtitles to tell me what the song really meant, and I saw how much meaning the song had to Piaf's life as whole at that point.The eventful life of Madame Edith Piaf is truly a winning acting piece for any actress. With the film and the play, I witnessed both actresses transform into Piaf. Lucky for Cotillard that she just needed to do this once right to be printed on film, the actress in the play had the additional challenge and difficulty to do repeated performances of this very physically and vocally draining role. In any case, both this biopic and the play will have you interested to listen more to the music of Piaf. Fortunately for us in the age of Youtube, we can also check out video recordings of the real Piaf in action, and we will marvel more about how these talented actresses portrayed her so convincingly.