Imagine, if you will, a biographical movie about Babe Ruth. It
shows the troubled childhood, and moves on to the promising early
years in Boston. Then it jumps forward to the final year in Boston
when an aging Ruth, although only a shadow of his former self, managed
a couple of final glories, despite a lifetime of over-indulgence. Then it moves on to his
painful death.
Is there something missing? I suppose that most Americans, even
people ignorant of the details of baseball lore, will be familiar with
Ruth, a dominant figure in our pop culture, and will realize that Babe
Ruth - the New York Yankee version - was the essence of America in the 1920s: swaggering,
successful, loud, generous, high on life, carefree. That was America's
"roaring" period between the Great War and the Great Depression, and
its symbols were Babe Ruth and The Great Gatsby. If you tell Ruth's
life story without his exuberant triumphs with the Yankees in the 20s, your
story never touches on why he was worth making a movie about in the
first place.
That is exactly what La Vie en Rose does with Edith Piaf. It
assumes you already know that she is to France in the 1940s as Babe
Ruth is to America in the 1920s. Making that assumption, it tells the
rest of her story. In fact, the film has only one brief scene which
takes place in the period from 1937-1948. Not a Nazi to be seen!
Essentially, there's nothing in the film about being the great star
and hero of the resistance, and plenty about becoming her and ceasing to be her.
Fortunately for the narrative, that's still a good story. In fact it's so
good that we would not believe it, were it not true.
Piaf lived a Dickensian childhood in miserable poverty. She was
sickly, shunted around between relatives, taken from her feckless
alcoholic mother, raised for a while in a bordello, and then in a
circus. She was blind, then cured. Her father was a novelty acrobat who left the circus after a
dispute with the owner and branched out on his own to test the market
as a free-lance contortionist. As you might expect, the market for
this turned out to be tiny, so father and daughter lived and performed
on the streets for pennies. Piaf worked as a street busker for more
than a decade before she was discovered by a nightclub owner (played
in the film by Gerard Depardieu, whose presence is legally required in every
French movie), whose own colorful and unsavory life came to an end in a
brutal murder in which Piaf was briefly a suspect.
After achieving her successes, Piaf disintegrated in the public
eye, enduring tragedy after tragedy, and taking a variety of drugs and alcohol in quantities great enough
to have destroyed her even sooner than they did. The end of her life
played out in public performances in the television era, so her
deterioration was as dramatically public as Judy Garland's
Why did she fall apart do dramatically? There were two
circumstances in 1949 and 1951 which provoked her deep unhappiness and
drug dependency. First, the great love of her life died in a plane
crash while flying from Paris to New York to be with her. Two years
later, she was involved in an automobile accident which started her
dependency on addictive pain-killers. In the end, however, it was
neither drugs nor booze which killed her, but cancer, which left her
looking ancient at age 47.
The script chose to focus on the tragic "lost love" aspect of the
story, which makes as much sense as any other approach one might
imagine. After all, Piaf's life included enough material for a
mini-series or two, but a biopic must distill that into a couple of hours in
which it must focus on some limited number of themes which will hold the attention of an
audience. Is it "true" that Piaf burned out because of her lost love,
or did she just indulge in the same excesses which have destroyed
divas throughout the twentieth century? I don't know. It seems to me
that the story of Piaf's uncontrolled public disintegration is more or
less interchangeable with Judy Garland's or Whitney Houston's or Janis
Joplin's, even though they represented different eras and different
musical styles. They all achieved more fame and wealth than they were
prepared to handle, and all of their problems exacerbated one another. Still, Piaf was a unique and memorable woman, so
the screenplay chose to move away from the generic diva story
and toward elements which would let her breathe as an individual.
That's probably a good thing, irrespective of its "truth."
While the major thrust of the film moves chronologically forward
from childhood to death, the narrative is not straightforward. There
are various loops backward and forward in time to emphasize the
correlations between what Piaf was to become and the events that made
her so. It's my belief that the filmmakers gave a lot of thought to
the sequencing of the scenes, and told the story in a way that is
always comprehensible and simple to follow, despite the time shifts.
My only quibble is that, as I indicated earlier, you have to know why
Piaf was worth making a film about in the first place, because the
film never shows you that portion of her life. It does show some of
her performances, but they are performed by an impersonator and many of them
take place before and after her prime. Even at its very best, Piaf's singing is an acquired taste,
a style rooted in her time and place, and would not instantly
demonstrate to contemporary audiences why she was considered great. She was kind of a
quavering French version of Ethel Merman, a real belter, with volume always seeming
to be her main objective, always reaching for either melodrama or
humor, and with no real sweetness or softness in her range, so most
Americans, especially young ones, will not appreciate her blustery and
culturally rooted style of singing. Most Americans will simply not
"get" her, as she herself admitted. As a young boy I would
occasionally catch Piaf on Ed Sullivan and found her hopelessly
quaint. At the time I found her appeal entirely mystifying. My
attitude wasn't helped by the fact that my mother, a classical singer
of abstemious personal habits, scoffed at Piaf's lifestyle and her "Frenchified
saloon singing." (Mom wasn't big on Sinatra or Garland either. What
can ya say?)
The point of all that is that the film doesn't work as well for
non-French audiences because it chose to tell the story around the
edges of Piaf's fame, just as my imaginary Babe Ruth autobiography
would not communicate well to non-Americans. An American audience
doesn't necessarily need any background on the Bambino's great years
if a filmmaker wants to tell a different story about a different part
of his life because the iconic Ruth is ingrained in our consciousness,
but such a story would prompt a "WTF" reaction from the rest of the
world. Some of that reasoning applies here as well. The French don't
need to be told why Piaf is in their hearts. For the rest of us,
lacking the background, Piaf's popularity can be more than a bit
baffling.
Whether you appreciate Piaf's cultural importance or not, it's
still an interesting story delivered around a tremendous central
performance by Marion Cotillard. It would not be SOP for a French
performance in a French film to receive a best actress nomination from
the Oscars. The Academy likes to honor its own, of course, but if they
were ever going to make an exception, this would be the time. The film
is good, albeit not Best Picture good, but the performance is
definitely Best Actress good. That was young and old Piaf up there on
screen, both played convincingly by the 30ish Marion Cotillard.
