'La Vie En Rose'

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

June 7, 2007

"I couldn't care less about America," says a dismissive Edith Piaf in "La Vie en Rose" amid her first U.S. tour. "They don't get me and I don't get them."

It is safe to assume that most younger moviegoers this side of the Atlantic have never heard of this most iconic of French singers, let alone weighed in on her. Whether one reacts to the mention of Piaf's name with ignorance or indifference, however, it is hard to imagine any open-hearted Yank not responding to this swaggering musical biography and its sublime leading lady, Marion Cotillard.

Befitting its flinty chanteuse who died, like Judy Garland, at a grievously premature 47, "La Vie en Rose" seems to pack several lifetimes of suffering and joy into the space of any given minute. Those who require strict linear progression in their bio-films might want to pop a Dramamine before watching Olivier Dahan's peripatetic musical drama, which jumps around in time with a dizzy-making abruptness intended to bang home the tumult and variability of Piaf's career.

Beginning with an on-stage collapse in 1959, "La Vie en Rose" traces Edith's emergence from a sickly, knockabout childhood, tended by the ladies of the evening at her grandmother's brothel and ministering to the needs of her circus-performer dad. Dahan underscores the melodrama of Edith's early separation from a nurturing prostitute (Emmanuelle Seigner), initiating a lifelong series of traumatic estrangements that would continue with the murder of a nightclub owner who plucked her from the streets (Gerard Depardieu) and the accidental death of her lover, prizefighter Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins).

Who knows if Edith actually made her debut at 10, wowing a street crowd with "La Marseilleise" at the prompting of her down-at-the-heels dad. What's remarkable is how Dahan makes such a hoary movie moment work anew, a feat of reinvention he accomplishes repeatedly throughout "La Vie en Rose."

In the inevitable scene where Piaf effects a glorious transition from cabaret waif to music-hall star, Dahan tunes out Piaf's singing voice, throwing into dramatic relief the singer's maturation as a physical performer. It's a brazen choice, and the effect is uncommonly stirring.

In stripping away that legendary warble for a brief moment, Dahan also makes us fully cognizant of the magnitude of Cotillard's acting triumph. While Cotillard lip-synchs to Piaf's recordings with enormous fervor, she is never more heartrending than when listening: taking in the praise of an adoring Marlene Dietrich, or lighting up as a French army corporal sits at a piano and plunks out the first bars of a song he has composed for her.

In the interests of a PG-13 rating, a prostitute's graphic lyric has been wiped from the subtitles, along with others from Piaf's bawdy repertoire. But Cottilard's indelibly expressive saucer eyes go a long way toward filling in blanks left by the untranslated songs. It's the sort of bravura, full-throttle performance that leaves one clamoring for encores.