12a, 140 mins

Watching Olivier Dahan’s film about the life of Edith Piaf, it occurred to me that if you’ve seen the life of one tragic artiste, you’ve seen ’em all. At various points in this film, the life of Piaf (Marion Cotillard) seems to melt into the lives of other biopic subjects such as Ray Charles (they shared a passion for the needle), Frida Kahlo (both had traffic accidents) and Billie Holiday (poverty-stricken childhood). She even has a touch of Robbie Williams (the need to check into rehab). In short, this is another showbiz saga starring a tormented artist.

For the French, Edith Piaf was the Vera Lynn of the lachrymose – a national icon of suffering. She was what they call a chan-teuse, what people in pop call a diva and what normal people call a right pain in the arse.

Background

• La Vie En Rose

• La Vie En Rose - Sunday Times review

Background

• Poor chick: the life of Piaf

• Edith Piaf

• Playing Piaf is risky for a rising star

Piaf, the woman behind the icon

French chanteuse Edith Piaf packed a lot of drama into her short life – a new biopic reveals the woman behind the icon

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Dahan says that one of the reasons he wanted to make this film is to show what it is that “drives an artist”. His answer could fit neatly on a postcard: pain. It’s the ultimate cultural cliché to draw a link between torment and talent. Here, the connection is literally made when we see a collapsed and exhausted Piaf crawling back to the stage and giving her all. Her pain is the audience’s gain.

La Vie En Rose is one of those biopics that likes to think it is not a biopic, simply because it eschews the conventional chronological narrative that begins at birth and ends in death. You can always tell when a film is in biopic denial – it keeps leaping back and forth through time. Here, we begin on stage in New York in 1959 and go back to Edith’s childhood in Paris in 1918. Then we’re in the early 1960s, then back to God knows where. Not even Doctor Who does this much time-travelling. At one point, it seems we have Piaf the child, Piaf the struggling singer, Piaf the star and Piaf the old woman, all competing for our attention.

Anyway, poor Piaf is dumped by her mad mum with her neglectful granny; she is then left in a brothel by her dad, to be raised by hookers with hearts of gold. She goes blind – for a bit. Dad comes back and she ends up in the circus.

Dad deserts her and the 20-year-old Piaf is on the streets, singing for her supper and sharing the proceeds with a pimp. She is discovered by a night-club owner, Louis Leplée (Gerard Depardieu) – and, just as she’s about to hit the big time, he is killed and she is at the bottom again. Another mentor comes and takes her to the big time. She finds love with a handsome French boxer, but more tragedy comes her way. It’s a miracle Dahan doesn’t go into the cancer that finally killed her.

His film panders to our modern taste for tales of human suffering, be it childhood poverty or adult tragedy. These days, bookshops are full of best-sellers featuring the sorry sagas of people who aren’t even famous. But this film seems to suggest that the suffering of an artist is somehow more interesting or worthy of our sympathy than that of a mere mortal. It expects us to be more impressed by the suffering of Piaf the woman than by the songs of Piaf the artist.

The trouble is that Piaf the woman is not an endearing character. She was a tyrannical diva who was forever barking orders at friends and employees. Of course, the modern biopic gives us celebrity lives warts and all – I can’t help feeling that, unintentionally, here we’ve been given all the warts. There’s nothing likeable or admirable about this Piaf.

As for Piaf the singer, well, a little Edith goes a long way, and this is a long film. There are whole scenes that could have been removed, such as a boxing sequence featuring her lover, Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins). Her big song, with which the film ends, is Je Ne Regrette Rien, a My Wayish anthem. We’re meant to admire her defiance, but only a very self-satisfied person would have no regrets about their life.

La Vie En Rose is a film that pays great attention to period detail and getting the look and sounds of the time just right. And yes, it has a kind of French sumptuousness to it, but something is missing. Here is a woman who really did live, love and lose – yet it all seems so lifeless.

The thing about biopics is that they always end up as showcases for the performer, not the person. In other words, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash were upstaged by Jamie Foxx and Joaquin Phoenix. The same is true of Marion Cotillard’s performance.

The fact that a young beauty like Cotillard has managed such a realistic transformation is a thing of wonder in itself. As the young Piaf, she stares out of haunted eyes, a child afraid of a scolding; as the old Piaf, she seems to have physically shrunk inward. It’s a technically accomplished performance, but I can’t help feeling that we never really get to the soul of its subject.

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