Songbird

Marion Cotillard plays French chanteuse Edith Piaf in the biopic La Vie en Rose. (Bruno Calvo/La Vie En Rose)

The artist biopic is fraught with risks. If done poorly, it can turn its subject into a caricature (see: Mommie Dearest). It can exaggerate the meaning of positive events (Walk the Line) while eliding less savoury ones (Pollock). And any attempt to recreate private conversations is a slide into the realm of fiction. Given all this, why do people keep making these films? Because we love to watch them. A biopic animates a person who for most of us exists as a collection of press clippings.

The subject of La Vie en Rose is Edith Piaf — “La Môme,” as she is known in her native France. Having come to prominence in the late 1930s, Piaf was a world-renowned torch singer who helped launch the careers of fellow countrymen Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. She was also a stormy, foul-mouthed boozer whose public triumphs acted as a counterweight to her intensely tragic private life.

Bored by a chronological narrative, director Olivier Dahan skips back and forth between eras, contrasting the highs and lows of Piaf’s career with vignettes from her hardscrabble youth. Born in Paris in 1915, Piaf was effectively abandoned by her mother, a prostitute and singer manqué. As a child, she lived with her father in a travelling circus (he was a contortionist), as well as in a Normandy brothel run by her paternal grandmother. The adolescent Piaf is played by Manon Chevallier, whose swollen pout and beseeching blue eyes convey a world of despair.

The adult Piaf is played by Marion Cotillard, who portrays the Gallic icon with breathtaking gusto. Cotillard is a burgeoning French actress; North American audiences may recall seeing her in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and the Russell Crowe romance A Good Year (2006). Although strong, neither of those performances foreshadowed the transformation that occurs onscreen in La Vie en Rose. Cotillard embodies Piaf’s physical presence: those sad-clown eyes, that twitchy comportment, the defiant curl of her lip, that duck-like speaking voice.

Philip Seymour Hoffman won critical approbation and an Oscar for his portrayal of writer Truman Capote, but that was Capote in one phase of his life; what makes Cotillard’s performance so remarkable is that she evokes Piaf at so many stages. We see Cotillard as the 20-year-old Edith, singing lustily on Paris street corners, a nervy girl with more sass than sense. We see Edith the consummate performer, beguiling New York audiences with her golden voice and endearingly gawky gestures. We see the arthritic, drug-addicted Edith (circa 1961), whose every performance held the potential for a breakdown. And, finally, we see the cancer-stricken Edith, who at 47 was a misshapen husk of a person. The only thing Cotillard didn’t do was attempt to sing like Piaf; Dahan was adamant that the film use original recordings of chansons like Padam, Padam, Je Ne Regrette Rien and La Vie en Rose. For the sake of realism, it was a smart move, and it does nothing to diminish Cotillard’s achievement here.

There’s no doubt that Piaf was a victim of bad luck: at different periods of her childhood, she was blind and deaf; at age 36, she had a devastating car accident that led to a morphine dependency. But Dahan resists painting her as a martyr; narcissistic and excitable, Piaf is barely likeable. While her drinking and temper fuelled her unhappiness, the film subtly implicates her in the misfortune of others — especially in the 1936 death of Louis Leplée. (Leplée was the Paris nightclub owner who gave Piaf her first paying gig. He was murdered by mobsters with previous ties to Piaf.)

Tightly written, gorgeously shot and strongly acted, La Vie en Rose shows how Piaf turned her dark chapters into luminous art. Yet the film is not without its flaws. It skims over Piaf’s multiple marriages — as well as her famous liaison with Yves Montand — in order to exalt her affair with Marcel Cerdan, the Algerian-born boxer who she claimed was her one true love. And Dahan doesn’t raise the issue of Piaf’s sole child (who died in infancy of meningitis) until the very end, during a hallucinatory vision on Piaf’s deathbed; the mention feels incongruous and tacked on.

Ultimately, the film’s faults remind us that the aim of a biopic is to provide audiences with an impressionistic sketch, rather than a thorough accounting, of a person’s life. And when the main actor evokes her subject the way Cotillard does here, lapses in narrative judgment become, well, if not irrelevant, then a lot less noticeable.

La Vie en Rose opens June 8 in Toronto, June 15 in Vancouver and Ottawa and June 22 in other cities.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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