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Reviewed by Steve Rogers
Film:	B+
Video Quality:	A-
Audio Quality:	A
Special Features:	D
DVD Review:	B

Marion Cotillard's Oscar-winning portrayal of French singing legend Edit Piaf highlights the latest in a recent slew of musical biographies on film. And like Ray, Walk the Line, etc., La Vie en Rose tracks the darker side of the performer's life with a standout performance by the title character. Piaf is considered France's greatest singer and for good reason. The petite chanteuse possessed astonishing vocal talents that allowed her to transcend the cabaret genre and achieve worldwide fame playing concert halls to sold out crowds. There's a scene late in Saving Private Ryan, where the squad members prepare to defend a French town against an expected German attack. Just before the action starts, three of them sit peacefully in the bright sunshine on the steps of a building as a Piaf song plays on a radio. The mournful beauty of her otherworldly voice perfectly accents the calm before the storm, as the soldiers await the imminent Nazi onslaught with dim hopes for survival.

That scene's inherent melancholy pervades Olivier Dahan's lengthy biopic. Virtually abandoned by her mother, the five-year-old Piaf is deposited by her father in his mother's brothel, where she is raised and cared for by a loving cadre of prostitutes. After losing her sight for three years to a bout of keratitis, she reunites with her father at the age of ten and begins to exercise her prodigious vocal talents singing on the street. When she's finally discovered by nightclub owner Louis Leplee, she gets the break she needs to escape the grimy streets and sleazy bar scene. But she is never far from those mean streets and her lusty appetite for alcohol and the good life, along with an addiction to morphine brought on by injuries suffered in a car accident, add toxic ingredients to the mix and she begins her slide down a tragic road to self-destruction.

Cotillard is mesmerizing in the role of Piaf, with a manic intensity that captures the emotional highs and devastating lows of the singer's shortened life with astonishing conviction. Fitted with a prosthetic overbite and unflattering wig for most of the movie, Cotillard literally immerses herself in the role, and the images of Cotillard as Piaf in her 40s are striking. The physical deterioration of Piaf due to illness and her self-destructive ways was brutal, and its realistically portrayed here with the comely Cotillard virtually unrecognizable as the sickly corpse-like woman who looks closer to 97 than 47 by the film's end. It's a challenging, physical role for Cotillard and she lets it all fly in the scene where she learns of the death of champion boxer Marcel Cerdan, the true love of her life. The result is a frightening emotional breakdown that vividly exhibits Cotillard's impressive acting skills.

La Vie en Rose is not without its flaws however and I felt the music and art of Piaf could have been given more space in the film. Also, the period of World War II, an interesting and controversial chapter in the singer's life, is basically omitted. But while Dahan's film is bleak and relentlessly downbeat in its portrait of the French icon, there are moments of insight into the heart of its subject. As Piaf sits on a tranquil California beach late in the film, she is asked by an interviewer how it feels to be so far from Paris. "I am never far from Paris," she replies. It's a perfect summation of the inextricable link between the city of lights and that luminescent voice.

Video Quality

The widescreen image is presented anamorphically in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and it's solid. Colors and fleshtones are accurate to a fault and image detail is fantastic. The picture was free from any distortion or grain allowing mid-century Paris to spring to life.

Audio Quality

The disc features a French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track with English, French and Spanish subtitles available. The surround sound was surprisingly active is this movie with excellent use of all channels. Subtle elements of the film like silverware clinking at a dinner party and audience chatter were deftly woven into the surround mix. The overall presentation was excellent and Piaf's music (apparently sung by another singer and lip-synced by Cotillard) sounded superb.

Special Features

Only one feature is included on the disc, "Slipping Into Character", but it is fascinating and illuminates the thought processes of Dahan and Cotillard in their approach to the film's subject matter. The film's Oscar-wining makeup effects are of course highlighted in this featurette, and Dahan relates his insistence that the makeup had to be virtually invisible on Cotillard to allow him close-ups while filming the later scenes in Piaf's life. Cotillard's makeup preparation reportedly took up to five hours, and she is seen with a shaved back hairline and eyebrows, emphasizing the lengths to which the actress went to play her role. I'm not sure why this is called the Extended Version though, since the running time of the DVD seems to match that of the theatrical version.

Summary

Though certainly not the definitive film biography of Edit Piaf, La Vie en Rose does feature the definitive biographical performance in Marion Cotillard's astounding Oscar-winning performance. The disc's superb video and audio quality are undercut however by only one skimpy featurette, for a film that cries out for backstory and critical opinion to flesh out its subject matter. The French version of the DVD reportedly contains a wealth of special features and we hope that material makes its way to a U.S. special edition of this worthy film.