Oscar Cleanup: LA VIE EN ROSE review

LA VIE EN ROSE
**** out of 4
Rated PG-13
Directed by Olivier Dahan

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: Best Actress-Marion Cotillard, Best Costume Design-Marit Allen, Best Makeup-Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald

Does anyone remember that one SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE sketch of the game show called "Ask an Old French Whore?" It had Garth Brooks in drag with a French accent and it was EVER so funny.

Is this an appropriate way to start a review about LA VIE EN ROSE, the period biopic of French torch singer Edith Piaf? No... No it's not. But I had to recall the memory of the sketch that culminated with the line "I think my whore's dead" to cheer myself up during this relentlessly sad movie.

But it is sad with purpose, as Piaf apparently never had an easy day in her life. Born of a drifter and a prostitute, she was raised in both the circus AND in brothel. She suffered a temporary blindness in childhood before she sang on the streets of Belleville for spare change. A producer tried to make a star out of her, but he died when her pimp killed him.

Wow... Johnny Cash was a PUSSY compared to this woman. And the kicker is that even though she went on to become a legend... IT GETS EVEN WORSE!

The narrative of Olivier Dahan's masterful film is fractured, going back and forth from Piaf's later life (when she is played by Oscar nominee Marion Cotillard) and her childhood where she is played by a couple of French moppets. Her childhood scenes in the brothel are quite memorable, as the hookers are beaten and "operated upon" by crazed doctors. Not to mention little Edith spends much of this early part of the film in a blindfold because she was.. Um... Blind. This leads me to believe that Piaf grew up not in France, but in Silent Hill.

Her later years are a fast moving locomotive of lovers coming and going, admirers, hangers on, not one but TWO car crashes and morphine abuse. And you know that late inning redmption that starts with rehab and ends with true love, Like Johnny Cash and Ray Charles and Dewey Cox had? Well...

What, in lesser hands, would seem like a bumper-car ride thorugh tragedy and despair becomes in the nimble grasp of French director Olivier Dahan the ultimate portrait of how and why a person needs to find solace in their art. Audiences acted, to Piaf, as confessors or kind ears. One often wonders, when we find out that our favorite singers or filmmakers or actors or what have you, how something as beautiful as their work comes out of pain and torment and loss. LA VIE EN ROSE, if nothing else, sheds a little light on that.

I first became introduced to Piaf's work, like a lot of you, during my favorite scene in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It was before the big tank battle at the end where Adam Goldberg, Tom Sizemore and Edward Burns were sitting on the cafe steps and having Jeremy Davies translate that French song that was playing. That was Piaf.

They were struck, as I was, at her voice, which seemed to defy both age and youth, existing not as some human thing, but as pure emotion suspended in notes and half-notes. A gracefully refined funereal keen. She's popped up at the periphery of my tastes, but have never seriously thought about buying an album until now. That's the mark of a great movie, isn't it? To plunk down more money to experience an artist's work?

And Cotillard, she of the blue Clara Bow eyes, is simply brilliant as Piaf. She manages the feat of skirting just shy of ostentation, giving a big showy performance real meaning. In Cotillard's hands, Piaf's up and down life is not acted, but felt. Both mechanically and emotiuonally, her performance is sound, moving and astonishing.

And I will have this woman... Mark my words...

In a way, the great LA VIE EN ROSE came along at the right time. So when Amy Winehouse finally ends her long and inexorable march towards her own mortality, we can look at Edith Piaf and see who did it best.