La Vie En Rose

Tonight's cultural experience is La vie en rose, which is about the life of Edith Piaf. Now I know very little about Piaf and I thought this film would be an excellent way of finding out about her and her life. Big mistake. The film does not deal with her life story in the form of a proper biography with a beginning and an end. In fact it starts with her final days, when she looked like a 70-year old woman, despite only being 47. Then the film shifts back and forth in time. Yep, it's another of my favourite backwards films. Except it's not even as simple as that. The film jumps haphazardly through her life, from childhood to adulthood to the end of her life, continually, back and forth. People appear and disappear from the film with very little explanation.
Perhaps this is deliberate, because Piaf was a woman of such high emotions and had such dramatic upheavals in her life. Perhaps her life receives the framework it deserves but for someone like me, who knew little about her, this lack of continuity just leaves me very confused and doesn't give me any clear sense of the shape of the life.

What I do discover is that she was abandoned by her mother, raised by a surrogate mother in a brothel, goes blind for a while, then is taken away from her surrogate mother to live with her father, who works in the circus and then she becomes a street singer. Then a cabaret owner discovers her and whisks her off the street and onto the stage. She is accused of murder but is eventually discovered by a composer and a radio impresario. By then she's already a heavy drinker and struggles with a drug addiction, although there are no specifics of this.

There is little mention of her successful career. The film focuses mainly on her tragedies, of which there are many. There are very few high points and happy moments in the film. Surely at some stage she must have been famous, healthy, and happy all at the same time?

Instead tragedy follows her around. Her love affair with a French boxing champion ends when he dies in a plane crash while heading to see her. On that night, we see him enter her bedroom and she prepares him coffee but we are given to understand that this is a figment of her imagination.

Also I'm not expert but I understand key points like her participation in WWII resistance activities were omitted, as well as her marriage late in life to a Greek singer twenty years her junior, who appears to give her a child.

At the end, a composer plays a new song for her, "Je ne regrette rien". This strikes a chord with her and inspires her to go ahead with a concert at the Paris Olympia, despite the fact that she has to be led to the stage, because she can hardly walk.



It's a good film, I think, but I'm afraid because of being unable to get fully involved in the film; I feel none of the emotion that I'm told this film would make me feel. You have to be a fan to get full benefit. By the end, I couldn't tell if she was in Paris, New York, on her deathbed or getting ready for her last concert.

I have 'no regrets' about seeing this film, but it was hard work.