La Vie en Rose.

"That Olivier Dahan's Édith Piaf film La Vie en Rose (La Môme) succeeds where so many others of its type have failed is a testament to the powers of the imagination," writes Susan Gerhard at SF360. "Not so much Dahan's imagination - on fairly bold display here - but the audience's: The chaos of Dahan's Chinese box timeline gives us plenty of room to puzzle over Piaf's life ourselves."

"Burdened by the overwhelming weight of its subject's endless tragedies, its running time and narrative are as bloated as its star performance, by Marion Cotillard, is refined to precision," writes Matt Singer at IFC News.

Updated through 6/9.

"La Vie en Rose trudges dutifully from one costumed 'defining' event to the next, building to a kind of Piaf theme park that plays out like a bad parody of Dickens or Balzac," writes Ella Taylor. Even so, "Cotillard raises France's poor, beloved chanteuse clean out of mundane pathos, into the ruined grandeur she deserves." And, also in the Voice, Leslie Camhi talks with Cotillard.

"Altogether The Deluxe Piaf, but, alas, it's not the best," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Claude Lelouch's 1983 Édith and Marcel (starring the extraordinarily flirtatious Evelyn Bouix) was a superior soufflé of history and legend, music and romance - another of Lelouch's swirling, underappreciated masterworks. Cotillard may be the Piaf the Oscars salute, but Bouix is the Piaf to be remembered."

"[T]he movie happily acknowledges what many a biopic fails to: it has taken liberties with the material," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. "The sentimental crescendo reached by film's end as she sings 'Non, je ne regrette rien' feels entirely earned - not just by Piaf but by Cotillard - so that you want to break into applause along with the enraptured audience onscreen."

"It's best to think of La Vie en Rose less as a biopic than as a melodrama, in both the literal ('musical drama') and generic sense: the emphasis here is on performance and emotion, and accordingly, the film is built on artifice and overwrought excess, pitched to a feverish, sometimes numbing, intensity," writes Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot. "So its structure is a perfect fit, diffusing the moments of excess before they become too exhausting, foregrounding Piaf's emotional journey above the chronology of her life."

Earlier: "Berlinale Dispatch. La Môme." and "Rendez-Vous. 2."

Update: Michael Guillén talks with Dahan.

Updates, 6/8: "[I]t is hard not to admire Ms Cotillard for the discipline and ferocity she brings to the role," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "But it is equally hard to be completely swept up in Mr Dahan's dutiful, functional and ultimately superficial film."

The film "only demonstrates that French music-hall warblers lived through the exact same clichés as their hard-rocking counterparts in Britain and America," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "Cotillard gives the sort of twitchy, self-conscious performance that's often mistaken for great acting, though it must be said that her lip-synching of Piaf's hits ('Non, je ne regrette rien,' 'Padam Padam,' the title song) is technically flawless."

"Maybe you will boo-hoo straight through this simple-minded, cheaply sentimental and unrelievedly lugubrious movie," writes Richard Schickel for Time. "Me, I made it to the long-delayed ending by shutting my eyes and ears to its dramatic passages and pretending it was a concert film."

Dahan's "approach draws more attention to the filmmaking than it does to the life," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Dahan seems to believe that chronology is bourgeois: Pure storytelling is all fine and dandy, but he wants us to know he's making art."

"We don't need another musty biopic, but clarity has its virtues," notes Robert Cashill.

"I think the secret of a good biopic is to choose a selection from the person's life, instead of trying to cram the entire life into two or three hours," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "The twin Capote movies (Capote and Infamous) did this well, focusing on presumably the most important chapter of the writer's life. This allows for time to slow down, for the film to linger on smaller moments that build character, nuance and personality, instead of bulldozing over whole months and years within minutes."

Update, 6/9: A "technically virtuosic and emotionally resonant performance that elevates the material from a somewhat episodic melodrama into something strange and riveting," writes Carina Chocano of Cotillard's turn. "Disappearing completely into the role, she travels between emotional extremes that today would come each with its own psychiatric treatment and corresponding pill."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Ernest Hardy on Piaf, Billie Holiday and Judy Garland: "Among them, the trio cover the traditions of American jazz, French music hall, Hollywood musicals and American standards. They also have in common crippling drug addictions; tragic love affairs; childhoods defined by abuse, exploitation and abandonment; and brothels. (Piaf was briefly raised in one; Holiday briefly worked in one; and Garland, of course, was a child of the Hollywood studio system.)"

Posted by dwhudson at June 7, 2007 12:43 AM