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Re: La Vie en Rose (2007)
I've joined the raves about Cotillard's performance elsewhere, but I disagree that it's an "average" biopic or an "unengaging" script. On the contrary, I think director and co-writer Olivier Dahan found a way to both use and subvert the conventions of the musical biopic in a way that reinforced Cotillard's stunning performance and made it even more harrowing.
WARNING. Some spoilers below.
Dahan's decision to fracture the chronology -- not just the typical flashback structure that was so delightfully skewered in Walk Hard but a constant leaping around among the various stages of Piaf's life -- allows Dahan to present the life more thematically, and what we get is an existence routinely punctuated by great loss. Everyone Edith cares about, or who cares about her, is constantly being pulled away from her.
This leads directly to another important element of the script: It so thoroughly takes Edith's point of view that it is no exaggeration to say it presents essentially her memories. Take the case of her good friend Mômone, who is taken away because she is underaged. In later scenes, it is clear that she ultimately rejoined Edith, but the return has no dramatic weight. The scene that plays loudly in the script (and obviously remains vivid in Edith's memory) is of the two of them being ripped apart by powerful outside forces.
About two thirds of the way through the film, there is a long tracking shot that leads Edith through another in her series of terrible losses and ends in . . . well, you tell me. I challenge anyone to parse that scene reliably into separate elements of memory, fantasy, dream and reality. You can't, because it's the kind of artificial construction that exists only in someone's imagination. It was at that moment in the film that I realized that, between Cotillard and Dahan, I had somehow been drawn inside the spirit (for lack of a better word) of a very troubled and very talented artist. The film's conclusion, set to "Je ne regrette rien", leaves no doubt that this is what the script was aiming for (and IMO brilliantly achieved). I can't think of another musical biopic that even comes close.
M.
"Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." -- Chinatown
"What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?" -- Roger Ebert
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