La Vie En Rose review

 Number 603 on the top 1000 films of all time is the musical biopic La Vie En Rose.

This French film tells the story of famed singer Edith Piaf, otherwise known as the Little Sparrow. Marion Cotillard stars as Piaf. From her impoverished childhood to her untimely death, we see the rise and fall of France's national chanteuse. 

I didn't like this film. It wasn't just that the subject matter didn't interest me - I am neither French nor a baby boomer so Edith Piaf has never been something that's high on my music list. Call me a culturally ignorant millennial, but c'est comme ca. I didn't like the way the story was told. It seemed random, chaotic and very incohesive. Like many other films it is told in a non-linear fashion and regularly plays around in time. 

It opens up on Edith as an adult and then cuts to her childhood and then to her as an adolescent, but whereas with other films there is a logic to this time-jumping, I failed to see any logic here. It was like the film-makers had realised at the last minute they had forgotten something important and stuffed it in anywhere they could. For example, near the end of the film we find out she has a child who died from Meningitis. We find this out in a flashback, but why was something of this magnitude not revealed until so late in the film? Not to mention all the numerous flash-forwards where we see Edith's ailing health.

And I certainly don't mean to diminish Marion Cotillard's performance. She won the Best Actress Oscar for this role - just one of six actors to win the award for a non-English speaking role - and she was good as Piaf. We bore witness to the many trials and tribulations of Piaf's life and Cotillard took us through her emotions well. And I think she embodied the character well. Reportedly she shrunk her already petite 5"6 frame to reach Piaf's diminutive 4"11 role. And I do remember reading somewhere that she worked with a dialect coach to capture Piaf's speaking voice as best as she could, although all the singing was dubbed by French singer Jil Aigrot.

Maybe this film would have been better suited to a lover of classic French music and not a philistine like me, but c'est la vie. Non, je ne regrette rien.