What a life
Deborah Ross La Vie en Rose 124, Nationwide Do go see this biopic of Edith Piaf, if you so fancy. Marion Cotillard is excellent as Piaf, and those Piaf songs are as gloriously wretched and desolate as ever. (She didn't exactly go in for 'The Sun Has Got Its Hat On', did she?). But La Vie en Rose is also strangely dull. Not Pirates of the Caribbean dull. Films as dull as Pirates of the Caribbean aren't two a penny. We'll have to wait quite a while to get anything quite as dull as that. But this is dull all the same, and at first I couldn't quite work out why, especially as the performances and songs are so good. But I now think I'm on to it and it is this: familiarity. Familiarity, I hear, can sometimes breed contempt but in this instance it did not. It bred ennui. At certain points, I think even my ennui had ennui. Ennui? Meet ennui. The two of them got on like a house on fire, by the way, but it was very, very tiring for me. I found I sighed a great deal.
It's not the fault of the film, as such, even though it is 140 minutes, which is much too long for pretty much anything in the cinema. It's more the fault of the biopic genre and the whole 'from the slums of so-and-so to fame all over the world' that does for it. We've seen A Star Is Born. And we've seen Lady Sings the Blues and Ray and Walk the Line. Well, at least I have. We know — or at least I do — that this journey from slums to worldwide fame will, after the initial euphoria and champagne and standing ovations, take in doomed love affairs, addiction, on-stage collapse, breakdown, rehabilitation and, finally, the credits rolling over a well-loved, famous song. I had a £5 bet with a colleague prior to seeing this film that the credits would come down on 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien'. And? I won. 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' about that bet. But the real trouble with such predictability is that all narrative drive is lacking, as is any imaginative drive. You know what is going to happen at every stage, no matter how the director works it. And that's where the ennui slips in, the sly old thing.
Certainly, Piaf did have an almost genreperfect, straight-to-biopic kind of life. She was born Edith Gassion in Belleville, a working-class district in Paris in 1915. Her mother was an alcoholic who abandoned her. Her father was a travelling showman, a contortionist. Edith grew up partly in a brothel, partly in the circus, and partly on the road with her father where she would sing for coins. She struck out on her own at 15, performing on the street before being spotted by Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu), the Parisian cabaret director who gave her the nickname 'La Monte Piaf' (Little Sparrow). This was no more than a gimmick at the time, but did presage what a fragile, bird-boned creature and performer she would become.
The director (Olivier Dahan) does, it's true, at least try to play with the narrative form by fracturing the chronology. The film starts with Piaf at the end of her life, teetering on stage like a broken puppet, then flashes back to her childhood. From then on it jumps all over the place in time, even keeping back early important events until nearly the very end. But it's to no great effect. The essential story remains that familiar one, no matter how jumbled up it might be. That said, there are some neat, dramatic effects. There's a terrific scene in which Piaf, who is broken-hearted and howling in her New York suite, turns round and suddenly she is on stage, delivering the pain and putting it right out there. A cliché, but neat all the same, and Cotillard is terrific, taking Piaf from young, awkward girl with the most peculiar, Joyce Grenfell posture through to huge, tyrannising star and then on to the withered shell she was when she died at 47. But it's just not enough. Where is any kind of emotional truth or insight? You could probably gain as much by reading the key dates in Piaf's life. That is the trouble with these kinds of films.
In short, if you like biopics you'll probably like this and if you don't, you won't. Further, if you do like them then there's every chance you'll think this a good one. So do go see it, if you fancy. You don't have to listen to my ennui. It's never bought me anything but hours of sighfilled unhappiness, anyway.
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