LA VIE EN ROSE

Life stories do not make neat dramatic packages. They tend to meander, digress and accelerate in fits and starts while making little sense - at least the kind of sense that can be gracefully compressed into two hours of screen time.

Yet filmmakers keep returning to the biopic, tempted by the chance to get intimate with the famous. It's a familiar syndrome.

La Vie en Rose is the story of Edith Piaf, the tiny Parisienne with the big, raw, heartbreaking voice and the short chaotic life. Piaf lived for just 47 years, but she packed those years with such an excess of ambition, anger, pain and thwarted love that only the most heroic - or foolhardy - of filmmakers would take on the job of trying to pick a path through the debris to reach a perspective. And so to Olivier Dahan, who has done just that, carving up Piaf's life like a jigsaw and pitching the pieces at us in the hope that we'll find enlightenment in the effort of fitting them together.











Anchoring the puzzle is the story of her childhood, which unfolds in flashback like an episode filched from Les Miserables and set down in the early years of last century. Five-year-old Edith, played by an angelic-looking Manon Chevallier, is living in Paris in the slums of Belleville when her indifferent mother decides to abandon her to the care of her drink-addled grandmother. Near to starving, she's rescued just in time by her father, who arrives home on leave from the war and takes her off to what she comes to think of as paradise. His own mother is a cook in a Normandy brothel and, in a pardonable leap of the imagination, Dahan has the brothel's working girls caring for little Edith with a tenderness she's never before experienced. Filmed partly by candlelight, these sequences look like apparitions from a fever dream and are so evocative that I thought it was going to be possible to forgive Dahan anything. But as Edith is wrenched from the cosseted life of the brothel to go on the road with her father, who pursues a precarious career as a touring acrobat, Dahan's impressionistic style quickly starts coming apart.











By the time Edith (Marion Cotillard) becomes a woman, earning a few sous as a street singer with her friend Momone (Sylvie Testud), the script's aversion to any kind of exposition has become a real problem. It starts flipping back and forth between the different periods in Piaf's life with a frequency that threatens to turn the jigsaw puzzle into a ping-pong game. Gerard Depardieu brings some much-needed heft to the rapidly changing cast as Louis Leplee, the impresario who gives Edith her first big break, along with the stage name Piaf - argot for "sparrow". But like almost everybody else in Piaf's life, he's soon out of it. And with the suddenness of his departure, the script grows even more jittery - a flaw that encourages you to dwell on what you're missing.