Piaf's life seems ideal biopic material. She was born into poverty, abandoned by her parents, and raised in a brothel run by her grandmother. Although many details of her life are clouded by legend, the film accepts the story that she was blind for several years as a child, but was cured when her prostitute friends took her to the shrine of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, to whom Piaf went on praying for the rest of her life. As a teenager she supported herself by singing in the streets under her real name, Édith Gassion, and at seventeen she had a child who died two years later. At twenty she was spotted by Louis Leplée, a nightclub impresario who hired her to sing and dreamed up the famous nickname Le Môme Piaf, a slang term meaning Little Sparrow that reflected her flighty personality and diminutive stature. Leplée was murdered the following year by criminals Piaf knew, but she survived the scandal and rose to international stardom. In later years she acquired famous friends like Jean Cocteau and Yves Montand, fell passionately in love with a world-champion boxer who died in a plane crash, almost lost her own life in multiple car accidents, and developed chronic alcohol and morphine habits. Her mind started to fail in 1963, and later that year she died of liver cancer. She was forty-seven.
To sum it up, Piaf had a hugely dramatic life. And this could have been a problem for the makers of La Vie en rose, since the ingredients of that life read like a laundry list of biopic clichés: rotten childhood, good-hearted hookers, gangster friends, celebrity friends, deaths and drugs, triumphs and tragedies, you name it. But the screenwriters Olivier Dahan, who directed the picture, and newcomer Isabelle Sobelman have kept things fresh by artfully scrambling the story's chronology, thus increasing its qualities of surprise and suspense. This strategy begins in the opening scene, when we see Piaf singing to an audience just after we've watched people summoning an ambulance because, as we see later still, she's collapsed onstage. The device persists throughout the film, which leaps across time and space as effortlessly as Piaf croons her favorite songs; it's a tad confusing at first, but it pays large dividends by dividing events along thematic lines instead of following the straight-line trajectory of ordinary movies. Even if you're already familiar with Piaf's history, you can expect the unexpected here.
Dahan's directing is equally creative, with a strong assist from Tetsuo Nagata's vigorous cinematography. I could cite many examples, but a particularly good one is the scene where Piaf learns that her beloved boxer has perished in a plane crash; even before she hears the news, the camera follows her about with a strangely off-kilter fluidity that gives the moment a surrealistic touch, making us know something is wrong before we're actually told. Flourishes like this are another solid firewall against any stale or worn-out plot material that might otherwise have weakened the film.
Anyone who makes a musical biopic faces a big decision about how to handle the performance scenes the usual choice is either to dub in sounds from the actual musician's recordings or create new performances that do their best to imitate the originals. Apart from a few numbers unavailable in top-quality Piaf recordings, Dahan wisely takes the first option, recognizing that Piaf's one-of-a-kind voice is the best possible gateway to an understanding of her mind and heart, and would be impossible to duplicate anyway. This makes Piaf the most illustrious member of the supporting cast, but the others are excellent in their own ways. Among them are the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu as Piaf's first patron, Emmanuelle Seigner as a prostitute who cares for her, Sylvie Testud as her youthful friend and drinking companion, Pascal Greggory as her manager, and Jean-Pierre Martins as the ill-fated prizefighter.
And then there are the songs, which deserve costar billing at the very least the marvelous title number, the stirring "Non, je ne regrette rien," the lighter "Mon manège à moi," and plenty of others. I've often been struck by the remarkably high number of first-rate music biopics there are, from high-toned entries like Mahler and Amadeus to jazzy fare like The Glenn Miller Story and Bird to rock'n'roll pictures as different as The Buddy Holly Story and American Hot Wax and What's Love Got to Do with It. Acted, written, and directed with hardly a false note, La Vie en rose, called La Môme in its native France, ranks with the very best. Piaf couldn't have asked for a better memorial.
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by David Sterritt
