Olivier Dahan
La Vie En Rose

I saw "La Vie En Rose" by Olivier Dahan. The French title "Mome", meaning little girl, is much more apt and gives a better idea. Because Edith's life was anything but rosy. The director chooses the path of reconstruction through continuous flashbacks and time jumps like pieces of a puzzle that, in the end, come together, but which may confuse those not fully acquainted with the biography of this extraordinary singer with Italian blood from her mother's side (half Livornese).

More than a film, it is a "Via Crucis" with many stations of suffering. Piaf lived a short life (1915-1963) marked by poverty and characterized by an existential gamble; losses and suffering of every kind were her unwanted companions but never broke her spirit. Olivier Dahan shows us a beautiful little girl in the "City of Light" at the beginning of the last century. The daughter of acrobats, she was raised in a Parisian brothel with altruistic and pure love by women who dispensed this feeling for pay, falsely and professionally. At risk of blindness from an eye infection, she healed, let's say, through the intercession of Saint Teresa of Lisieux. The detachment from this unhealthy world of erotic illusions and vice, yet full of true humanity, was dramatic. One day her father retrieves her and brings her back to the street. A busker "ante-litteram," he has the girl perform, revealing her vocal talents in a spine-chilling and very profitable rendition of the "Marseillaise." The moved and generous bystanders reward her with unseen amounts of money. Our "Mome" becomes a "star" of the "rue parisienne" amidst absinthes and various bouts of drunkenness.

Baudelaire, the priest of artificial paradises, claimed: "I am the wound and the knife." Here too beauty and wounds abound. In post-war France, her unmistakable voice, a "grinder of r's," resonated through the streets of existentialism around Montmartre. But one day, like in all fairy tales, a Pygmalion materializes named Louis Leplée (a splendid Depardieu) who hears her and brings her to sing in his successful club, setting her ascent in the world of song in motion. He gives her the stage name Piaf (sparrow in French). But the time for smiles is truly brief. Louis is murdered, and Edith is investigated. But it is only the beginning of an elegy of pain. This tiny figure, only 1.47 meters tall, is pursued by misfortune but does not let it break her. The poet Aragon declared, "When she thinks of opening her arms, her shadow is that of a cross." Armed with a voice full of warmth, lyrical nuances, and extraordinary power, she continues her ascent with ups and downs but without fear of challenges. She remains forged by the streets, which, as we know, strengthen and make one invincible. This "Mater dolorosa" loses her daughter at a young age due to a sudden illness; her greatest love dies in a plane crash, and she herself risks her life more than once. Palliatives surface to endure so much adversity; the alcohol and drugs begin to weaken her. But Edith becomes a "star" and succeeds, after a brief failure, even in America, where she is hailed and treated like a diva. Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin never miss her live performances. Cocteau writes for her. Many acclaimed and budding poets propose their lyrics to her to turn into songs.

DeBaser friends, this is a beautiful, calamitous, and intense film about the life of a singer endowed with a gift from the Gods in the form of a voice. You wouldn't want to miss it, would you? It will move you almost to tears and convince you that the lives of the great "Vocationed" to art are inexorably marked by a karma of high suffering and existential discomfort. Almost a law of retribution. Someone claimed, "VITA BREVIS, ARS LONGA." How to contradict this axiom? Edith's grave at Paris’s monumental cemetery is always full of fresh flowers. The film closes with the vocal power and the sung, poignant suffering of our transalpine nightingale; the musical lyrics encapsulate, as in a synthesis, her troubled life with clouds and flashes: "NO! RIEN DE RIEN / NON! JE NE REGRETTE RIEN / NI LE BIEN QU'ON M'A FAIT / NI LE MAL / TOUT CA M'EST BIEN EGAL / NON! RIEN DE RIEN / NON! JE NE REGRETTE RIEN!"

Finally, it is impossible not to mention the extraordinary performance of actress Marion Cotillard, slightly taller than the original, who delivers a unique performance of intensity, pathos, and verisimilitude. Oscar-worthy!!!!!