NO MAS MOVIE REVIEW

La Vie en Rose (La Môme)
Director: Oliver Dahan
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Gerard Depardieu
Produced by Légende

I recently saw this Édith Piaf bio-pic, which is titled La Vie en Rose in English for some strange reason, titled La Môme (The Kid) in French. To call this film La Vie en Rose, with its implicit suggestion of a life viewed through rose-colored glasses, certainly seems like a cruel joke given the true nature of Piaf’s life, and especially given the version of it that finds its way onto the screen here. Most notable in No Masylvania for her famous affair with the great Algerian-born middleweight Marcel Cerdan, Piaf lived a life that in its rudiments bears more of a resemblance to that of a longshot club fighter than a preternaturally gifted entertainer, a life that left her as damaged in the end as any oft-pummeled pug who took his one too many far too early in the game. She died of cancer in 1963 at the age of 47, her body a withered, humpbacked shell, ravaged by years of hard drinking, drugs, and despair. Her curious version of la vie en rose.

This is one of those movies in which time is elastic, and the jumps are jarring at the beginning. Not until around the midway point does it find a groove between scenes of the cancer-ridden Piaf right before her death, the dying but resilient Piaf battling to return to the stage in 1961, and the younger, more vibrant edition as she navigates the many tragedies of her life.

Although her childhood was on the whole a tale that would have made Dickens cringe (abandoned by her mother, taken in by her alcoholic, contortionist father and his borderline grifter’s existence, ultimately left to sing on the streets for her booze money), the most prominent of these tragedies is her doomed affair with Cerdan (Cerdan and Piaf pictured right), doomed because the fighter would die in a plane crash before their love could ever come to any satisfaction. The scenes between Cerdan, the beauty (played by the ridiculously handsome actor Jean-Pierre Martins) and Piaf, the beast, are the best of the film, although as fleeting as their affair was in life. Cerdan summons Piaf to a date in Manhattan under the pretext that they are both ex-pats who are longing for Paris. After taking a whiff of the pastrami at the rough-and-tumble joint where they meet (“it smells like a wet dog”), she whisks him off to a majestic restaurant and orders him a proper meal. They proceed to flirt in believable fashion, and soon the first bell has rung on their affaire de coeur.

It will be of great interest to the No Mas faithful that the Tony Zale/Marcel Cerdan middleweight title fight (Ring’s Fight of the Year in 1948) is shown at length, with Piaf ringside, just as she was in real life. The fight itself is as preposterous as all movie fights, but the scene is perfectly staged to resemble a technicolor version of an old-time fight stadium (the Zale/Cerdan bout was in Jersey City of all places), and if Martins is just a little too dashingly Gallic to pass for the admittedly handsome Cerdan, whoever they got to play Tony Zale is a dead ringer.

Cerdan won the middleweight crown from Zale, and then lost it in his first title defense a year later to Jake LaMotta. Flying back to the States in October of 1949, where he had a rendez-vous planned with Piaf before he was scheduled to begin training for a LaMotta rematch, his plane went down. His death catapulted Piaf onto an even steeper descent of self-destruction than she already had been traveling. According to the film, after the Cerdan tragedy she became even more impossibly demanding and shrewish than she was before, only later to be redeemed by the humbling fact of her imminent death. This seems like the greatest crime of the film, for if, as I have read elsewhere, that along with being intermittently impossible Piaf was also regularly magnanimous and generally charming, she’s been done quite an injustice by the La Vie en Rose treatment. The beast is primarily on display here – a beast with good reason in the film’s cosmology – but a beast nonetheless. There is a lot of darkness and doubt (to bring the Mekons into this), a hell of a lot of shrieking in abominable pain, and not much magnanimity to speak of.

Still, this is a gripping film, and for more than just a brief re-visitation of a great chapter in middleweight history. Cotillard is breathtaking in the starring role, making one of those rare bio-pic transformations that achieves the alchemy sought in these films. It’s also a great movie to look at on the whole, and the music is divine. If you aren’t stirred by the “Je ne regrette rien” finale, than you don’t have a pulse. I tell you, it’s more moving than a toupéed Frank, or even a dangerously obese Elvis, singing “My Way”. If you don’t believe me, check out the real deal below. On s’en émerveille.