ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

EDITH PIAF’S life was as intense and emotional as any of the songs that she immortalised. Filled with triumph and tragedy, passion and scandal, it is the stuff of any biographer’s dreams.

‘La Vie En Rose’ (12A) is a gloriously old-fashioned wallow in the Piaf story presented with such style and confidence that the only possible response is to surrender to its excess.

A spellbinding performance from Marion Cotillard provides the heart and soul of this epic French production. Structured around short, fast-paced scenes, ‘La Vie En Rose’ is like a mad gallop through the Piaf family album.

It is a film that darts around in every direction paying little heed to the conventional demands of a linear narrative. One minute we are in the New York of the late 1950s as an ailing Piaf collapses. The next moment we experience her early years in a Normandy brothel run by her grandmother.

Then it’s back to New York before careering into the Montmartre of the 1930s where she is discovered by nightclub owner Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu). The film is never dull, although it can be confusing and exhausting.

Piaf’s great love affair with boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins) is covered in a few moments of agony and ecstasy. Only in the film’s dying minutes do we discover that Piaf had a daughter who died of meningitis.

Despite its flaws, ‘La Vie En Rose’ still wins your heart because of Cotillard. She is staggeringly good, capturing every gesture and mood of the “little sparrow”.

She also does an amazing job of lip-synching to Piaf’s recordings and is so accurate you would almost swear that she was doing the singing herself. It is a performance that is destined to be showered with awards and its provides the best reason to see this overwrought but irresistible biography.

Nationwide release

Director: Olivier Dahan
Stars: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Pascal Greggory, Emmanuelle Seigner, Jean-Pierre Martins, Gerard Depardieu.
Screenwriters: Olivier Dahan
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 140 mins
Country: France
Year: 2007

© Allan Hunter, 2007