La Vie En Rose

For any of you with a soft-spot in your heart for Edith Piaf, the French chanteuse of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and early 60s, you owe it to yourself (and your penchant for self-flagellation) to see La Vie En Rose, which is a new biopic about the woman who defined an era of music with the massive beltings from her tiny frame.

I do not speak much French and my exposure to Edith Piaf was initiated by the tribute that seemingly half of my favorite musicians pay to her work, but I went to this movie and it was a car crash on celluloid, a complete fucking disasterous mess, and perfectly emblematic of the life of the Sparrow.

In one scene after Edith (played brilliantly by Marion Cotillard) has come into her own, having overcome poverty, sickness, childhood in a whorehouse, blindness, and heartbreak, she is asked why she is being so menacing to her management and so dismissive of the demands of her stardom, she responds to the effect of what's the use in being Edith Piaf if I can't be?

From an amateur's standpoint, I think this scene makes this movie valid in its depiction of her life. They took liberties with her personal history, they show agony after agony, but half the theater left in tears because of how she is unapologetic to anyone for her landfill of tragedy and her capacity to capture the quixotic part of each of us, the tones of longing and completion that border on mania.

This film elicits the sense that you should be living your life differently and that you should love fully to the point of personal exasperation. After seeing this film with a date, we never saw each other again. It may not have been the movie that caused it, but had we gone to see Knocked Up or Spiderman 3, I am fairly certain we would be intact. This movie has that power, to depose self-delusion and to corrupt the compromises of personal outlooks. This is the kind of film that puts a magnifying glass over one's own soul and allows the light to pare away the unbidden detritus.

I give it a B.