Berlinale Dispatch. La Môme.

For a portrait as sketchy as the opening film at this year's Berlinale, La Môme (La Vie en Rose), at nearly two and a half hours, is also nearly twice as long as it should be. Or the filmmakers could have gone another route. Given the smorgasbord of tumultuous events and illustrious names with which a life like Edith Piaf's might tempt a screenwriter's imagination, a week-long television mini-series could work - and work well, if it, too, were built on Marion Cotillard's magnificent performance as the French singer who truly warrants the designation "legendary."

Both Toby Jones and Philip Seymour Hoffman have demonstrated in their own ways how to avoid the trap of caricature when portraying a character who practically was one himself. Though Cotillard lacks material to work with anywhere near as rich as the screenplays for Infamous or Capote, she's managed to work her way - you can practically smell the blood, the sweat, the tears - into the same class. Tiny, feisty, impetuous, egotistical, self-destructive, downright infuriating at times, the Piaf Cotillard wrenches on to the screen in spite of all the clunky obstacles thrown her way is also all but supernaturally talented, incredibly alive and vibrant with an inexplicable yet undeniable sexual aura. Scrawny and hunched, her face painted ashen white, her eyes sunken and deeply, scarily sad, she's like some voodoo doll come to life to take control of anyone who dares to reach out to help.

At today's press conference, young director Olivier Dahan said he was inspired by a photograph - not by a song, he emphasized (though it does remind me to mention that, thanks again to Cotillard and her voice work, the shifts to and from the playback of Piaf's original recordings work surprisingly well) - to make not a biography but "an intimate portrait." Very late in the game, we realize that we've been watching shards shed from the spotty memory of an ailing drug addict, which is supposed to explain why we've been not so much jumping as flailing around the chronology of Piaf's tragically short life. She died when she was 47, by the way, though as Cotillard noted today, she looked like was (and perhaps she might as well have been) in her 70s. Starting with Piaf at age 19, Cotillard nails all the various stages in between.

Chronological blips are fine; in fact, in biopics, they're all but expected. In Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix's Johnny Cash fixates on a saw blade and, before you can sing, "I keep my eyes wide open all the time," we're fading back to childhood. The leaps in La Môme are sometimes just as literal - a prostitute who's taken Edith as a child under her wing flips out a little and paints Black Dahlia-like smiles on herself and the little girl (thank heavens it's just lipstick) and - cut! - here's Edith, at the peak of her career, applying one more layer of crimson to her lips. Too often, though, the sudden leaps are neither clever nor obvious, and overall, there are way, way too many of them.

As the club-owner who discovers Piaf singing on the street for stray coins, Gérard Depardieu doesn't have much more to offer than his presence and that discoverer's look. You know the movie cliché: The performer performs and the camera slowly eases up to the discoverer's face - stoic on the outside but excited as hell on the inside: My God! This is the one I've been looking for! Even so, he arrives too late and is gone too early. Only one other story, that of Piaf's affair with boxer Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), plays out just long enough to gain any sort of narrative traction. But even that one constitutes a mere fraction of the film's duration.

And yet remarkably, for all those reels, great swaths of the actual biography go missing. We catch a glimpse of World War One, but none of the chronological leaps lands us in a scene in which anyone even bothers to mention WWII or Piaf's involvement with the French Resistance. Marlene Dietrich appears briefly as an admirer but not as the friend she was. And so on.

So what can we possibly be busying ourselves with during all those other fragmented scenes? One thing and one thing only, really: Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf.

Posted by dwhudson at February 8, 2007 12:22 PM