La Vie en rose en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_en_rose_(film)"La Vie en Rose (literally: "Life in Pink", or as we would say: "Life through rose-colored glasses") (released in France as
La Môme, literally: The Kid) is a 2007 French cinema film directed by Cesar Award
nominee Olivier Dahan, about the life of the legendary French chanteuse Édith Piaf, and is named
after her signature song....
Plot
The film presents a fractured and largely non-linear series of key events from the life of Édith Piaf.
Although scenes often jump back and forth across decades (evoked as flashbacks mostly
from within Edith's memories), parts of her childhood take up much of the first part, and the
movie ends with her death, and the performance of her song, "Non, je ne regrette rien."
As a small child in 1918, Edith Piaf is crying on a stoop, near some other children on the streets
of Paris. Her mother stands across the alley singing, panhandling for change. Edith's mother writes
a letter to her child's father,
the acrobat, who is in the trenches of World War I. She explains that
she's dropping Edith off at her mother's so she can pursue the life of the artist.
Her father returns to Paris and scoops up Edith, covered in insect bites and sores, from under the
blanket of a bed in a dilapidated house. He drops her off at his mother's, who is a madame of
a bordello in Normandy.
There, Edith is adopted informally by Titine, a young troubled redhead who sings to Edith, plays
with her, and walks the streets of their small town. Titine and another prostitute care for Edith;
they are repeatedly demeaned and abused by brothel customers.
Screams of pain ring out one night, as Titine rushes down the hall to help her friend, who explains,
"He wanted to play doctor... with his instruments." Edith enters the room, saying
she cannot see.
A doctor identifies the condition as keratitis, an inflammation of the eyes, and her eyes are wrapped
in cloth. She and Titine visit St. Therese at Liseux, where
she prays for vision. Later, as the
members of the brothel pin up laundry in the backyard, Edith slowly pushes off her bandage
and reveals her eyes, and blinks up at the sky.
Several years after the end of the war, Edith's father returns and takes Edith to live with
him, at loud protests by Titine, who must be held back while he bundles Edith into a cart.
Her father works
in the circus as an acrobat.
In one very poignant scene Édith is outside cleaning up after dinner at night.
She stops to watch a fire eater practising, and in the flames sees an apparition of
St Thérèse
who assures her that she will always be with her - a belief that Édith carries with her for the rest
of her life. When Edith is ten years old, her father leaves the company after an argument
with the manager and begins performing on the streets of Paris.
At one point a passerby asks if Edith is part of the show, and with prompting by her father to
"do something,"
she sings La Marseillaise. More crowds gather around her and are obviously moved.
Years later, Edith makes a friend from
a factory job, Mômone, and they wander the streets,
drinking from a bottle of wine, and Edith occasionally sings for their supper, quite literally.
After singing a few songs and getting a meal in a bistro, her mother approaches her for some
change. When Edith gives her a centime (or something that small), her mother yells at her
that her daughter will never help her either. She also continues to yell "I am an artist!"
Her mother is grabbed by the waiter, and Edith and her friend quickly leave. Edith and Mômone
go to a local bar and pay
Albert, a slick dark haired pimp, and receive warnings that if she
doesn't pull in more money he will "have [her] open her legs like the rest of my women."
Singing on the street in Montmartre, a neighborhood in Paris perched upon a hill close to the
Sacre Coeur
(Sacred Heart), a man approaches her and introduces himself -
he is Louis Leplée, who has a nightclub that caters to both the lower and upper classes.
She sings for him the next day,
and his homosexual lover, hostess, and other workers at
her club are instantly appreciative of her skills, though the hostess is quite jealous.
Pere LePlee changes her name to Piaf, a colloquialism for
sparrow, because her original
name is too long and off-putting. He introduces her at his show a week later, with new clothes
and a new song. His audience is also appreciative, and he introduces her to the president
of the radio in Paris. She leaves the club quickly, despite the acclaim, and goes to the local
bar where she passes Albert a large bundle of cash, and he returns one bill.
Mômone is still in her entourage, and on New Year's Eve, 1935, Edith meets her next Pygmalion-esque
manager, yet she does not follow up with him at all, simply pockets his business card.
She and Mômone drink buckets of champagne and are rude and loud to almost everyone in their milieu.
When one woman approaches to compliment Edith, she responds, "Yeah, I don't like your mug!"
Afterwards, Pere Leplee is shot dead, and
everybody thinks it is Edith's role in introducing him
to the mafia, namely, the pimp Albert,
that causes his murder.
She is interviewed by the police at a raucous cafe with a ton of paparazzi. She tries to sing at
a low grade cabaret with Albert accompanying on accordion but she is shouted off the stage.
In utter despair, Edith finally meets up with her next savior- Raymond Asso, a talented songwriter
and accompanist. He discovers her "great hands," and teaches her to gesture with them while
singing. He also emphasizes enunciation, formal wear and comportment. Before their first
concert at a music hall, "Not a cabaret," the manager intones, she has a fierce bout of
stage
fright and is huddled in the dark in her dressing room, thirty minutes after curtain call.
He advises her finally to "stand up," and she manages to shake off this fright. This performance
is a resounding success.
She is in a large flat in Paris with her entourage, reading a Cocteau play, and joking with
Mômone who is dressed as a man in this scene.
She puts off the conductor of the orchestra despite the performance being "in 48 hours";
she invites in an army corporal who asks if she will perform
his song. She listens and immediately
embraces it, performing it the next night. (This is the trailer.)
Edith next travels to New York City for more performances. She meets Marcel Cerdan, a fellow French
national
boxer competing for the World Champion title abroad. They first dine
at his "local spot", a diner where she gets a pint of beer and a pastrami sandwich.
She teases him that this is not a date, and they end up at a very fancy restaurant, where she orders
the wine and entrees.
He reveals that he has a pig farm, to which Edith laughs very loudly. Marcel tells her that, while
he's away, the farm is run by his wife. Edith is speechless, but is quickly falling in love, as she
reveals to Mômone that night. Marcel later attends her performance of La Vie En Rose,
after which they meet
Marlene Dietrich, who reveals that Edith's singing made her cry.
That night, Marcel and Edith are led through a fire escape of Edith's hotel, where she states,
"I'm starting to like this city,
the stars are out tonight". They spend their first night together.
Edith later attends Marcel's bout for the championship, which he wins.
Later on, at a party in her suite, Edith babbles to her maid and secretary Ginou that she doesn't
mind that Marcel is married, she knows he loves his family. Mômone is annoyed that Edith
talks about Marcel all the time. Edith calls Marcel, asking him to fly to New York from Paris straight
away. A drunk Mômone threatens to leave Edith during the phone call.
The next morning Edith wakes up to Marcel, who is in a suit lounging on her bed.
She rushes off to get him coffee, joking with Mômone and Louis who are subdued, standing in
the suite in different rooms. She rushes off to get Marcel's present, a watch, and gets
irritated that she can't find it. Ginou comes to the door with a very sad expression.
Exasperated, Edith asks what is wrong with everyone. Louis, her manager, takes her aside and
tells her that
Marcel's plane crashed. Edith hysterically searches for
the ghost of Marcel that was
lounging on her bed just a moment before.
Her mourning consists of seeing
a psychic,
cutting her hair and performing.
There are many flash forwards to a small aged-looking Edith with frizzy red hair, sitting in a chair
by the lakeside. She can barely move, and fights with
her nurse about drinking carrot juice.
Another set of flash forwards depict Edith with short curly hair, plastered to her face like she
is feverish, singing on stage and collapsing every other song. She is taken back to her green
room, only to be yelled at by Louis to stop performing, as she is conducting her "
suicide tour."
She gets more shots of morphine and continues to perform.
Later that night, she asks to ride with "
The American," to drive 400 miles to another
town to "catch some air." She tells him to turn around, and
in his bad French he questions her, then
crashes the car[/color]. We learn in another flash
forward that she has broken two ribs and must be hospitalized, explaining the earlier flash forwards,
of her convalescence in Grasse, with the carrot juice fights. In another flash forward, Edith is
hosting a large party at a Parisian bistro. She toasts to Marguerite who saw her
"as a princess," before anyone else did. She flirts with the waiter, and topples a bottle
of champagne, not due to drunkenness, but her arthritis. She finally sees the owner of the
restaurant and implores him to get her a gift. She asks for a ring, with tons of diamonds on it.
Louis quietly tells him to simply replace the champagne she spilled.
The next morning Louis opens her bedroom door to a small Edith on the large bed, with curtains drawn.
He offers her breakfast but she tells him no, she is expecting someone. A young man comes
in the room and lounges on her bed. Louis leaves, sitting outside the door. Time passes and he
re-enters the room. Five or so bloody syringes are on the bed and both Edith and her young
man are lying there with their eyes open, in relatively the same position.
After her first convalescence,
she travels to California with her husband Jacques Pills
and drives around with Ginou and some others in a car. Ginou is car sick and Edith takes the
small break as an opportunity to
drive the car, which she does, straight into a cactus.
She jokes that she will now have
to hitchhike.
She sits with Jacques at the side of a pool and is offered a strange fruity martini drink.
She wonders if he will divorce her now. In the next scene, they are at a doctor's office, in America.
She explained that she has been using drugs since the plane crash. Before the doctor can tell
her how the shots have been affecting her health, her husband says he wants her to go into rehab.
She tells the doctor that she wants to get better.
Five years after this event, a small, frail, hunched Edith slowly pads into her living room.
Her entourage is crowded, concerned, on the other side of the room. She determines that it is
impossible, for obvious reasons, to perform at the Olympia. Her long-time arranger Bruno Coquatrix
is told to cancel the show. A new songwriter and arranger shows up with a song, "Je ne regrette rien",
and Edith exclaims: "You're marvellous! Exactly what I've been waiting for. It's incredible. It's me!
That's my life, it's me". She tells Bruno that she will perform it at the Olympia.
She sits in her dressing room and searches for her cross that she always wears. She sends her maid
and secretary out to get it, and at that point has a series of flashbacks. When she returns
with the cross, Edith places it on, and shuffles out onto the stage.
She begins singing "Je ne regrette rien," to more flashbacks:
A sunny day in the United States. She walks out to the beach with her knitting. This is a smaller,
red-haired Edith with an obvious stoop. She waves at the lifeguard and sits near the breakers.
A young woman with a purse and bag approaches and introduces herself. She is there
for an interview. She asks Edith simple questions: what is her favorite color? (blue), her favorite food?
(pot roast). And then more questions. If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
"Love." To a young girl? "Love". To a child? "Love".
Louis carries a bundled up Edith into her bedroom and tucks her into bed. The subtitle reads that
this is the date of her death. She is afraid. She says she cannot remember things.
She flashes back to small moments, her mother recognizing that they have similar features, but odd eyes.
Her father giving her a Japanese doll that she longed for. From the years when she was a street
performer, she remembers her child, Marcelle, that daughter of Louis Dupont. She remembers how
he yelled at her for taking Marcelle out on the street. She was singing in a cabaret when Dupont
came to tell her Marcelle was in the hospital. They arrive, and Marcelle has already died of meningitis.
Edith dies in her bed.
In the last scene of the film, Edith performs her debut of "Je ne regrette rien"
(I don't regret anything) at the Olympia.
"------------
What would we do without Cliff's Notes? ;D