La Vie en rose

Truthiness in cinema

2007

Review: June 26, 2007

Director: Oliver Dahan

Starring: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Pascal Greggory , Emmanuelle Seigner, Jean-Paul Rouve, Gérard Depardieu

Totally unnecessary

THE SETUP:

A highly impressionistic version of the life of Edith Piaf

DISCUSSION:

One of my annoyances with mainstream movie critics is when they go see an adaptation of some work, usually literary or biography, and they’re all like “Well, it doesn’t represent the original Schnitzler novel at all…” and you cannot believe, for even one second, that they’ve READ the Schnitzler novel or studied the life of Socrates or whatever it is they’re talking about. Such is the case here—there are a lot of critics getting all up on their high horses because the film is not historically accurate and try to pass it off as though they are all just EVER so familiar with Piaf’s life and career that they can just spot the differences right off. Sorry, I just don’t believe it.

Anyway, a quick glance at Edit Piaf’s Wikipedia page will let you know that what’s here in this “impressionist” biography is only about half of the story, heavily enhanced and rearranged for dramatic emphasis, with huge areas of Piaf’s life being left out. But you know what? Who cares? From what I can tell, the film rarely outright lies, it’s more just lies of omission or rearrangement. But what’s there seems true. It’s ‘truthiness’ in cinema.

The movie begins with Edith as an eight-year-old begin taken away from her mother, who isn’t caring for her, and placed in a brother run by her grandmother. There she develops a relationship with a prostitute, Titine, who seems to be entirely fictional. She endures blindness for a while, then her father picks her up and she goes to work with him, performing, and soon singing, in the street. Just to give you an example of this film’s creative liberties, in reality, apparently, it was her mother who ran the whorehouse, she was blind from three to seven [not the year or so it seems in the film] and then deaf from eight to fourteen [not mentioned at all].

From the beginning the movie is flashing way forward to the last years of her life and back again, so that as things go on the entire film develops a swoony tone of being lost in impressions and memories. We’ll come back to this. Anyway, soon Edith is singing for her father, then we jump forward until she is a young woman, and played by Marion Cotillard. Now here’s where the ‘truthiness’ comes back, because although I haven’t the slightest idea what Piaf was really like in real life, it seemed entirely plausible that she was exactly like this. That is, Cotillard’s performance fleshes out exactly what I THINK Piaf would be like. She immediately seems like another person, but what really makes it work is that she never wavers for a second. She is wholeheartedly in this character from beginning to end—and so convincing in the later stages of Piaf’s life, when she looked like an 80-year-old at the age of forty—that I’m a little stupefied to now learn that this actress is only 32! Anyway, she deserves every acting award that exists for this. We’ll come back to her, too.

It goes on, Edith sings in the street and scrapes for meals, is discovered and put before a proper audience, throws numerous self-centered shit fits, meets an imperious and borderline abusive voice coach who re-trains her to sing properly and use her hands, attains massive fame, comes to New York [which they make look fabulous], has an affair with a married Moroccan boxer… etc.

What the movie excels at is expressing small, impressionistic and emotional points without hammering them down your throat. For example, at one point she is singing in her first club, and afterward goes to her old haunt across town, where a guy who is sort of her pimp for singing takes her wad of money and hands her back one bill. She looks at him for a moment like “Why should you get all that?” and this very effectively saves us from having to go through the scene where she confronts him and he yells at her and she storms out… Similarly, there is a moment in which she finds out that the handsome Moroccan boxer she is clearly smitten with is married with children. A brief cloud passes over her face, but she soon returns to her high-spirited enthusiasm: she has seemingly said to herself ‘well, then that’s what the parameters of this relationship will be.’ And to get back to what I was saying about the elliptical nature of the narrative and Cotillard’s performance, part of what makes them work so well together is that when you have scenes of the older Piaf with that feral, hungry look in her eye right after a scene in which she is an urchin wandering the grimy streets of Paris, literally feral and hungry, one doesn’t have to put together how that person became this person. And that, when done well, is much more powerful that correct biographical information that stops off to duly note her work for the French resistance.

And this is what the movie is doing—it's not a straightforward biography, it takes the form of Piaf's MEMORIES of her life, which would explain why things are rearranged and elided over and left out. There is also a wonderful sequence toward the end when she is pointedly shown taking a sleeping pill, expecting to wake to wonderful news. She wakes, and has a vision that the thing she wanted has come true—but soon finds out a tragedy has occurred. She wanders around her apartment wailing, then turns and is suddenly onstage. This little bit expresses the whole "she turned her pain into song" deal much better than has been expressed in hundreds of other performance movies with the same sentiment.

It’s ironic, because many critics are down on this for being a dreary, lifeless straightforward biography like Ray, when right in front of them all this interesting fracturing of chronology is going on. And of course their main criticism is that it’s not historically accurate—although that would surely render it even more dreary and routine. To tell you the truth, I think most of them don’t understand what’s going on here, and how good this movie actually is. For example, a few prominent and respected critics have mentioned that a heartrending episode from Piaf’s early life is introduced right in the last ten minutes. Okay, so I guess you were asleep during the part where she says that long-buried painful memories were only now coming to the surface? And then I guess the whole undercurrent of sadness that she has been in denial about this incident her entire life went right by you too, huh? Sometimes it kind of amazes me the things that major film critics completely misunderstand.

Anyway, a very good film with a great performance at its center. Sure, it’s not the most historically accurate thing, but I don’t think that’s the point. This is one of those films that gets better and better the more you think about it. If you want a good introduction to Piaf’s music and a vague idea of what her life was about, you’d better high-tail it to the theater.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Yes, it’s very, very good.