La Vie En Rose – It’s 1959 and the film opens with Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) collapsing on the stage, just before the story spins us back and forth through her youth, and the dramas, booze and deaths that plagued her. In 1918 she was a child brought to Normandy to her Grandmother’s home a.k.a. Madam of a whore house, where Piaf’s world is instantly opened before her big, troubled, luminescent, eyes, that seem to saturate everything to her soul. Without belaboring the childhood, director Olivier Dahan moves us through her youth, her freak stint singing in a local circus, and moves us to her teen years where she sings for her supper on street corners, reminiscent of a tiny bird. Diminutive and naïve Piaf is a fiery force screaming her way out (literally) until a passerby, Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu) a night club owner, finally takes her seriously. With drawn-on pencil thin brows Piaf belts out her cabaret ballads articulating words and emotions like nothing the city of Paris has ever seen. But when a car accident (one of many in a series of events) render her arthritic, her life alternates between her passion for the stage, her passions for morphine and her passion for the boxer, Marcel (Jean Pierre Martins). The movie continues to crash through her years much as she crashed through the rooms of her homes, demanding more and more, while becoming less and less. For Edith Piaf, happiness and tragedy eventually merge into one and the only place she can control them both, is on her beloved stage, where she feels no regrets. This rich, vibrant biography (one of the best in recent years) leaves the biggest question of all – why did they release so far away from Oscar Consideration in late autumn? Four Tiaras
