There's a French expression to describe an abrupt and disconcerting shift between two opposite emotions, it's "emotional elevator". Well, as far as emotionality goes, Olivier Dahan's "Le Vie en Rose" doesn't feel like an elevator, but like Russian mountains, so exhaustive it transcends the 'biopic' format. We don't discover the life of Edith Piaf, but her feelings, through her songs, her tragic love stories, and naturally, through Mation Cotillard's extraordinary performance, that swept away (and deservingly so) all the major acting awards in 2008.What a performance indeed, so intense and heart breaking, I kept on questioning myself, on which field Edith Piaf was the better at: singing or loving? "Love, just love", she said, to an interviewer's question on the most important thing in life. And she would never have been half the artist she was if she didn't inject the very passion that drove her short life. She celebrates her centenary today, but she didn't live half of it, yet her legacy is immense. She's still the artist with this loud, powerful and clear voice, this giant of French music, despite her being two inches shy of five feet. But the loving and beloved singer had too gigantic a heart in such a small frame.Yet that voice, that diction that she learned the hard way, and allowed her to sublimate the alliterative "Non Je ne Regrette Rien" testimonial song ('I Regret Nothing') transcended her frail body, as if all the strength Edith was blessed of was in that heart, and the voice that expressed it. When Edith sung, everyone was silent, because you can't listen to anything else when she sings, except the beating of your own heart, or an inner voice humming "La Foule", "Milord" or "Padam" melodies. Like love, singing is all a matter of communication and that's what Edith Piaf knew the best, communicate her feelings. And Dahan's gutsy directing knew how to communicate this ability.There's a very well directed scene where Edith Piaf is about to perform her first song at the Olympia (Bruno Coquatrix's emblematic music-hall that she would miraculously resurrect in the early 60's, at the expenses of her health). Edith is first stricken by stage fear, literally frozen, then she goes and what happens is similar to the moment where she sung 'La Marseillaise' after her father's sidewalk number failed. It's a revelation, and from that moment, a star is born. And this epiphany is simply magical, we don't hear the singing; it's all expressed through Cotillard's gracious and poignant body language, and surprisingly, we feel the music. It's as simple as that.This moment allows Marion Cotillard to showcase her talent and push it into higher and higher summits. She's not just impersonating a singer, she's not just lip-synching, she just totally dissolved herself into Edith Piaf. Rarely has there been female performance that met with such unanimous critical acclaim and for reasons. Cotillard makes you feel the exhilaration and pain for having entrapped her soul into such a larger-than-life character, a person whose infinite capability of lovingness ultimately destroyed her. And one scene captures this tragedy, the scene that probably locked Cotillard's chances to win the Oscar, and the other awards.Edith Piaf had many lovers, but one stood above the others and formed a legendary pairing, as he was a legend in his own field, boxing. His name was Marcel Cerdan. The day before his untimely death, Piaf is in a state of grace, the culmination of her happy days, but she's a vehicle of emotions that can only be fueled by love, and she needs her Marcel… so badly she implores him to take the plane. The morning after, her friends come with bad news. Of course, I'm not sure it happened just as the movie suggests; with the first hallucination of Marcel coming back, but that long shot covers a wide range of emotion, stages of grief escalating, to culminate with her heart-wrenching cries and ending with her iconic tribute to the man she loved the most, the "Hymn to Love".That four-minute shot encapsulates Piaf's life was about: a few moments of joie de vivre meant to end as tragedies. So much for 'la Vie en Rose'! From her raising by a singing prostitute Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) and the devastating way, her father (Jean-Paul Rouve) snatches her away, from her miraculous encounter with Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) while singing in a street with her friend Momone (Sylvie Testud) to the assassination of this man, the one she owed everything to, starting with her "little sparrow" nickname. And the sparrow became the bird of ill omen held responsible for Leplee's death. Edith Piaf was a carousel of contradictions.It's extraordinary that such an immense artist never had a biopic, but I think I can figure out why. First of all, her life was so emotionally rich that even watching a documentary about Edith Piaf is enough to make your heart melt. And to play Edith Piaf, one must be pretty sure of his casting. Cotillard is nowhere near 4 feet 8, her beauty is more Hollywood-like than Edith yet she was so intense, so excessively passionate that she became Edith, it took the greatest actress to play the greatest singer. And Cotillard was born to play it. Speaking of birth, she named her son with Guillaume Canet, Marcel, as to keep something of Piaf's sparkle forever connected with her life. Of course, there are many chapters missing from Piaf's life, but it's just like the film embodied the tragedy of a woman too frail to carry such a gigantic heart, even a movie couldn't contain all the emotionality that cemented the tragedy of Edith Piaf. So, as Edith Piaf would say, there's nothing to regret, the film is as great as it is. And it has almost everything to do with Mation Cotillard's performance.

Cotillard does an incredible portrayal of Piaf, so much so that I did not even recognize her. Granted I have only seen her once or twice in a film (Inception being one of them) but the way she totally immersed herself into Piaf's character is just so amazingly well done. She definitely deserved that Oscar for best performance. Supporting actresses Testud and Seigner were also amazing in their characters and really added a realistic feel to the film. Basically all actors and actresses in this film helped to create its phenomenal experience of Piaf's life. Shout out to Jil Aigrot, who lent her voice as Piaf's singing voice -exquisite. The story is great though the non-linear narrative does jump around quite a bit. However, after investing more time in the film it soon becomes clear as to which point in time of Piaf's life the scenes are showing. There are also little date indexes which would appear on screen and those help, but for the most part I came to find that the chronology of the film cleared up with repetitive scenes that seem to belong to the same time period. The story does a great job at covering pretty much all bases of Piaf's life, from childhood to old age, and the drama in between is exciting, inspiring, and heartbreaking all at once. Another Oscar winning element for this film is its make-up. As mentioned, the film jumps around in time, and the make-up on Cotillard to portray Piaf is truly incredible. Especially in the depiction of Piaf's middle adulthood (30-40s) the combination of Cotillard's phenomenal acting and make-up really brought Piaf's character alive. Oh, the wonders of make-up. In addition, everything in the mise-en-scene helped to emphasize the atmosphere of the setting. With the help of editing and the soundtrack, different parts of Paris transcend through the screen. I fell in love with the aesthetics of the film, and felt emotionally attached to the characters. A really fantastic portrayal of a music icon. Read more movie reviews at: championangels.wordpress.com

The recent biopics of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles were quite well done, but at times it felt as if you could superimpose them over each other scene for scene. The problem is that each film tried to tell an essentially uplifting story of hard beginnings, super-stardom, setbacks and ultimate triumph, with great songs emerging as an expression of personal struggle. But there's just not that much drama in a tale of a talented rich person nearly (but not quite) screwing up, and emerging better for the experience, so once the initial breakthrough has occurred, the rest of the movies are just illustrated documentary. 'La Vie En Rose', the story of Edith Piaff, is a bit different, even though it also uses the "song as expression of self" trope. This is because Piaff, while she also came from a poor background and struggled with drugs, ultimately didn't have a happy ending: she died young, prematurely aged. Also, as the film tells it, she was a strong, tempestuous and difficult woman, someone who lived her wealth and fame as if it might be taken from her at any moment, a form of behaviour that was sadly self-fulfilling. Marion Cotillard plays this troubled soul with some brilliance, from street gamine to ailing diva. Piaff's music is at one level unsubtle, and its rarely heard in the modern world. But even if you're more partial to rock-and-roll, hers is the more compelling story.

I have long heard of this film, since it had won the Oscar Best Actress prize for lead actress Marion Cotillard for her total embodiment of the central character, French singer Edith Piaf. Oddly though, I never really got to watch this movie until now. It was only because I had just seen an amazing stage production called "Piaf," a play written by Pam Gems in 1978. This play introduced me to Piaf as a most dramatic and tragic character. I felt compelled to finally watch this movie "La Vie en Rose" and compare notes.Thankfully for the play, I was able to get the flow of the whole story, despite the technique employed by the film director Olivier Dahan of telling her story non-linearly, in erratic flashbacks. Some of the flashbacks would inexplicably merge into main story which may confuse a lot of viewers who have no knowledge of Piaf's life story. If you knew how the story goes in the first place though, his story telling style choices may actually come across as artistic. Unlike the play, this movie tells a lot about Edith's sad and eventful childhood. This part of her life would include interesting tidbits about being in the circus, as well as going blind with her sight restored by what seemed to be a miracle by her patroness Therese of the Child Jesus. These details of course was beyond the scope of the play. The play though spent significant time to tell about Piaf's activities during World War II, as well as about her second and last husband, Theo Sarapo. The latter was mentioned in passing by Piaf on her deathbed. On the other hand, the film totally skipped these two important episodes of Piaf's checkered life.But both in the movie and play, the music of Piaf is front and center. In the film, while Marion Cotillard perfected the stance, facial expression and gestures of Piaf, she only lip-synched to the original recordings or recordings done by a sound-alike. The stage Piaf though had to sing LIVE with bravura with every performance. The final song "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" was a truly a spectacular showstopper in both film and play as sung in French. However the film thankfully had English subtitles to tell me what the song really meant, and I saw how much meaning the song had to Piaf's life as whole at that point.The eventful life of Madame Edith Piaf is truly a winning acting piece for any actress. With the film and the play, I witnessed both actresses transform into Piaf. Lucky for Cotillard that she just needed to do this once right to be printed on film, the actress in the play had the additional challenge and difficulty to do repeated performances of this very physically and vocally draining role. In any case, both this biopic and the play will have you interested to listen more to the music of Piaf. Fortunately for us in the age of Youtube, we can also check out video recordings of the real Piaf in action, and we will marvel more about how these talented actresses portrayed her so convincingly.