Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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81 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memo to the Hollywood Academy: Cotillard for Best Actress!!, 20 Nov 2007
Let's start with the cliche. This one happens to be true, so believe it: Marion Cotillard is every bit as awesome as you have already heard - she doesn't act Piaf, she IS Piaf!! Not only that, but she captures and bottles the singer through her formative years as an unknown street singer forking out protection money to a pimp, through her arrogant stardom and many tragedies, to sad and embittered old age (a relative concept since Piaf died before her 50th birthday with an abused body and the appearance of a 95-year old.) If Cotillard does not win Best Actress Oscar by a country mile, it will be proof positive of the unreasonable prejudice against foreign language films by the Hollywood establishment - there has not been a finer display of acting these past 30 years.
As for the film, it has its highs. In particular, the ambiance of Piaf's early years in Normandy and Paris have been captured to a tee. There are also fine cameo moments, such as Piaf's relationship with Marcel Cerdan and the shocking footage of her alcoholism and drug abuse. But a number of scenes may leave the audience slightly baffled, other than adding padding!
The wayward timeshifts in La Vie En Rose are a trifle bizarre, though some make sense - using the imagery of Milord to pinpoint her life as a young girl in a brothel run by her cold-hearted madame of a grandmother. The script also uses the splintered brain of the dying singer to pick out a kaleidoscope of images from her past. Inevitably, a big screen biopic omits many critical moments and rewrites history for dramatic effect, but here the emphasis is strongly on building up a portfolio of evidence for the woman and the hows and whys within her background. In many cases this works well, but the difficulty comes in that there is no unifying theme on which to hang the pegs.
My advice is just to take in what you see and piece it together - the results are well worthwhile! As a character study, this is as rounded and complete as any you will find. La Vie En Rose pulls no punches and portrays its subject warts and all. Piaf was not always a likeable personality but her voice dripped with the pain and emotion. Art imitating life? Maybe....
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67 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exhausting!, 13 Sep 2007
Don't plan to see this film and then go out for a lively night on the town. You will be so spent after the one hundred forty-one minutes of this gut-wrenching film that when the lights come on at the end, you'll need a minute to figure out where you are, and then additional downtime to process all you've seen. Days later, you'll still be thinking about this slice of life--and Piaf.
Piaf's story is well known to her long-time fans--brought up in a brothel, wrested from the only life she knew by her father so they could join the circus, her teen years on the streets, her "rescue" by a crime figure who gave her the start to her career, and, ultimately, her international success and final illness. She was always frail, sickly, malnourished, and wildly temperamental. She was often on drugs or alcohol, and she was always in search of true love (not finding it till late in her life). All this is depicted here with its horrors and its rare moments of tenderness, the cinematography (Tetsuo Nagata) so brilliant that the realistic, dark settings invite the reader's emotional entry into them and exploration of them.
Marion Cotillard becomes Piaf, a physical likeness that is uncanny in its realism (one wonders if she can ever play another part without conjuring up Piaf's image), and her emotional connection to Piaf's music is total. Her song performances are absolutely flawless, as are her gestures, and the only clue that she is lip-synching is the unmistakable Piaf voice that emerges from her mouth. Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu), the nightclub owner whose murder by organized crime draws Edith in for questioning, shows the genuine care he has for Edith and the tough face of a man who has seen and done it all.
Marcel Cerdan, the heavyweight boxer who captures her heart (Jean-Pierre Martins) gives her something to live for, besides her music--at least for a while--and it is genuinely affecting here to see how earthy and unaffected he is in her presence. The supporting actors, all French, are outstanding, and few viewers will forget Emmanuelle Seigner, playing prostitute Titine, who cared for Edith as a child.
The film belongs to Cotillard, however, and all aspects of the film, from the brilliant writing of Olivier Dahan (who also directed) and Isabelle Sobelman, to film editing (especially the lip-synching to Piaf's songs), and the sets, costuming, and makeup, are designed to enhance her performance. The film follows no chronology, jumping from her childhood to her old age and then to some of the high points of her career, creating an impressionistic film of some of the signal moments in her life. It is difficult to imagine any biopic that will ever come close to this one in its power, but then, again, it's difficult to imagine any singer who will ever capture the world's imagination in quite the way that Piaf did. Mary Whipple
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40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishing lead performance, 12 Feb 2008
If there are lots of reviews on here saying Marion Cotillard is amazing as Edith Piaf, there's a reason - she is. Her performance here is totally amazing and utterly mesmerizing. So many films these days (especially Hollywood ones) are over-hyped, and filled with good looking puppets - 2-dimensional 'actors' chosen for their looks rather than acting skills. Marion Cotillard is a glimpse back into a more golden film age where people could actually act - really act - and even on these terms she knocks the socks off many golden greats. She really does inhabit the part of Piaf.
There's a totally bizarre review earlier on here saying she was miscast and didn't act...it has to be one of the most ill-judged things I've ever read on here. Even one of Edith Piaf's closest friends, Ginou Richer, who is still alive and sat in on the recording of the final scene at 'Olympia', paid tribute to Cotillard (in an interview in the Guardian newspaper), saying:
"Marion has it exactly, the way she walks, talks, her way of laughing. The hardest part for her was lip-synching the songs, but really, you'd say it was Edith singing." That's some tribute coming from someone who lived as a companion with Edith for 15 years.
The same earlier reviewer got it wrong on the songs too - most of the Piaf songs in the film are real Piaf vocal performances, re-mastered for the film.
The film itself isn't the greatest scenario/synopsis of Piaf's life - it misses a lot of the complexities of Piaf's life, and several of her key relationships - such as with Yves Montand - are overlooked. The director apparently did this deliberately, because he wanted to concentrate on Piaf's life as a woman vis-à-vis her art. To a certain extent he does succeed, even if he does out-Hollywood Hollywood in the process. I also agree with one previous reviewer who says that the immense adoration felt for Piaf in France is not shown or contextualised. Anyone unfamiliar with Piaf's life story might be forgiven for thinking she was just a famous singer. She wasn't - she was, and still is, an absolute icon in France. The crowds for her burial in Père Lachaise brought Paris to a standstill. But these omissions don't necessarily detract from the film's power, which lies totally with the quality of the acting and the visual cinematography.
I have to say that the scene where Edith looses her true love, Marcel Cerdan, will stay with me for ever.
PS
2 DVDs in box - the second one containing 7 deleted scenes, a look at how Marion Cotillard transformed herself into Edith Piaf, and a feature on Edith Piaf.
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