HER big eyes bulging with trepidation, her small frame prematurely stopped with arthritis, Edith Piaf, as depicted in La Vie en Rose, suffers more than almostany troubled screen heroines since Joan Crawford sacrificed all for her ungrateful daughter in Mildred Pierce and Susan Hayward went to the gas chamber in I Want to Live!
Born into poverty as Edith Gassion in 1918, Piaf is shown to have led a life marked by losing everyone she holds dear before dying young in 1963. Her father returns from the war and takes her away from her boozy mother. While he works as a circus contortionist, he leaves Edith with his mother, who runs a brothel in Normandy.
Edith temporarily loses her sight and finds a surrogate mother in Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner), a fictional whore with a heart of gold. But her father takes her away again, encouraging the child to sing for money on the streets. An impresario (bow-tied Gérard Depardieu) discovers her and renames her Piaf after the French word for sparrow. She loses him, too. Another loss looms inevitably when she falls head over heels for married boxing champion Marcel Cedran (Jean-Pierre Martins).
Olivier Dahan's film loses some details, too, eliding Piaf's experiences during the Nazi Occupation, glossing over her two marriages, and only belatedly noting that she had a daughter, who died young
The crucial problem with La Vie en Rose, however, is not one of omission, but in its shapeless, fragmented structure. It's all over the place, copiously captioned as it breathlessly - and generally pointlessly - leaps back and forward in time with the intense energy that drove Piaf's legendary stage performances.
Some sequences are quite peculiar, as when a police officer is investigating a murder and he interrogates Piaf in a public place with photographers happily snapping all around them. Some others are potently staged, such
as Cedran's title fight, cut to Piaf at her most dramatic on the soundtrack, and a sweet vignette in which Marlene Dietrich expresses her admiration.
What propels the films are a couple of remarkable, impassioned performances. One is Piaf's unique singing voice on the soundtrack. The other is Marion Cotillard (last seen here in Ridley Scott's useless A Good Year), whose perfectly judged portrayal captures the diva in
all her driven ambition, stroppy tantrums, personal and professional insecurities, drink and drugs excesses - and shining, magnetic talent.
MICHAEL DWYER
