Movie Watch
"La Vie En Rose": Moving biopic of a French national icon
As recent biopics like Ray and Walk The Line have attested, the path to musical stardom is usually paved with rags before riches, and so it goes that Olivier Dahan's sizeable biopic of French singer Edith Piaf is not shy of a poor-girl-turned-diva plot. Piaf (which translates as 'sparrow') lived a colourful, hectic life and Dahan has created a film to reflect this, but his fractured portrait of the singer is centred by some glorious samples of her music and a sterling central performance from Marion Cotillard.Piaf was homeless from a young age, adopted by prostitutes and took to singing for her supper in her teens before she was spotted by a nightclub impresario. In her scant 47 years she crammed in so much, reaching dizzying heights of stardom in France, before becoming addicted to morphine and wasting into a tiny hunched figure before her untimely death. La Vie En Rose hits all the melodrama plot points in its disordered telling of Piaf's tale, a cast of characters swirling around the tiny epicentre that is Piaf and her overwhelming drive to sing. Cotillard is stunning as Piaf, convincingly assimilating the musician's looks and poise, lip synching to Piaf's songs like the woman herself. She also ages remarkably, there's not a whiff of pantomime dame in her 'elderly' make up. La Vie En Rose succeeds in telling an involving and moving version of Piaf's life, giving the audience reasons why she told such a story of heartbreak and defiance through her music. Source: BBC
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Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in the film |
