With the notable exception of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould — a movie every bit as singular and uncompromising as its subject — every musical biopic ever made looks more or less the same. Humble origins, early opportunity, creation of signature sound, rise to fame, relationship hassles, loneliness of the road, substance abuse, death and/or decline with optional comeback. La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan's long, extravagant portrait of Edith Piaf, only demonstrates that French music-hall warblers lived through the exact same clichés as their hard-rocking counterparts in Britain and America. Dahan does his best to shake things up by opening with the "elderly" Piaf — she died at forty-seven, looking a good twenty years older — and then skipping back and forth in time, juxtaposing the struggling nobody with the ailing legend. But this approach only underlines the genre's inherent shapelessness, making each scene feel like a self-contained factoid (crippling conjunctivitis! car accident! accused of conspiracy in a gangland murder!) rather than part of any dramatic or even thematic progression.
That doesn't much matter, though, because the true draw of movies like this is the lead actor's transformation, invariably described as "stunning." People are already touting Marion Cotillard as the Oscar front-runner, and it's certainly true that she looks and sounds here nothing like the coltish beauty who seduced Russell Crowe in A Good Year just last fall. Slathered in deglamming makeup and perpetually hunched over (Piaf was four-foot-eight), Cotillard gives the sort of twitchy, self-conscious performance that's often mistaken for great acting, though it must be said that her lip-synching of Piaf's hits ("Non, je ne regrette rien," "Padam Padam," the title song) is technically flawless. I can't imagine that Piaf's trilling, declamatory vocal style will appeal to a contemporary American audience (though I suppose nobody's expecting the eighteen-to-thirty-four crowd to rush out to this movie), but it's only when we see her perform — and hear her actual voice — that La Vie en Rose momentarily springs to life.
Everything else, scrambled chronology notwithstanding, is just Derrière la Musique. — Mike D'Angelo
