The Little Sparrow Soars! J’Aime Beaucoup New Edith Piaf Film

BY REX REED

Imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. This is why Marion Cotillard’s sensational performance as Edith Piaf in the awesome new film La Vie en Rose is so unforgettable. Like Stephen Fry’s Oscar Wilde in Wilde and Toby Jones’ memorable Truman Capote in Infamous (light years ahead of Philip Seymour Hoffman), Ms. Cotillard doesn’t try to imitate Piaf, the greatest French chanteuse of all time. She channels Piaf. “The little sparrow” comes to life before the camera in this long, exhilarating and dazzling movie masterpiece, while Ms. Cotillard delivers one of the most inspired and breathtaking performances in film history. La Vie en Rose left me devastated. READ MORE ...

Piaf Picture May Not Be Great, But Full of Feeling

BY ANDREW SARRIS

Olivier Dahan’s La Vie En Rose, from a screenplay by Mr. Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman (in French with English subtitles), moved me as no other musical biopic has ever moved me—which is not to say that this overlong French production is a good, much less great, movie (soap opera, some might say). READ MORE ...

Imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. This is why Marion Cotillard’s sensational performance as Edith Piaf in the awesome new film La Vie en Rose is so unforgettable. Like Stephen Fry’s Oscar Wilde in Wilde and Toby Jones’ memorable Truman Capote in Infamous (light years ahead of Philip Seymour Hoffman), Ms. Cotillard doesn’t try to imitate Piaf, the greatest French chanteuse of all time. She channels Piaf. “The little sparrow” comes to life before the camera in this long, exhilarating and dazzling movie masterpiece, while Ms. Cotillard delivers one of the most inspired and breathtaking performances in film history. La Vie en Rose left me devastated.

It’s a harrowing story, and although writer-director Olivier Dahan doesn’t burden himself with the traditional formalities of linear, chronological biography, few of the gruesome facts are spared. Born Edith Gassion on the Paris pavement in 1915, the unloved child of an alcoholic mother and a father who was a circus contortionist, Edith was a sickly waif covered with sores and suffering from malnutrition and various diseases, raised in a brothel in Normandy by her father’s mother, a notorious madam (played by Simone Signoret’s look-alike daughter, Catherine Allégret), and narrowly saved from deafness and blindness by the prostitutes who nursed her back from the jaws of death. At 16, she gave birth to a baby who died of meningitis. In 1935, she was discovered in the streets of Montmartre singing the songs the whores taught her, nicknamed “La Môme Piaf” (the Sparrow Kid) by nightclub owner Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu), who managed her career until he was murdered. Piaf was suspected of the crime, roughed up by the cops, but acquitted in time to make her first record. By the 1940’s, Cocteau was writing plays for her, her comrades were Chaplin, Chevalier and Yves Montand (who became one of her many lovers), “La Vie en Rose” became her signature song, she worked with the French Resistance and entertained the Nazis at the same time (shades of Verhoeven’s Black Book), and after the war her international fame brought her to New York, where Virgil Thompson saved her career from bad reviews and she fell for the love of her life, the dashing Marcel Cerdan, who beat Tony Zale for the World Middleweight Boxing Championship. After he died in a plane crash in 1949, she grew despondent, and after two near-fatal automobile crashes in 1951, became addicted to morphine. She married twice, made a comeback—withered, cadaverous, hunchbacked and high on drugs—at the famed L’Olympia, and died of cancer in 1963 at age 47. She was forbidden a funeral mass by the Catholic archbishop, but the streets of Paris were filled with hundreds of thousands of mourners, traffic came to a complete halt, and 40,000 fans attended her graveside ceremony. For a woman less than five feet tall, she lived the life of a dozen people, so no wonder it takes nearly three hours to capture it all on film. La Vie en Rose sprawls all over the place, so you have to be alert to follow it. You will never be remotely bored.

Ms. Cotillard has more faces than Piaf’s saga has chapters. Flawlessly lip-synching the icon’s passionate voice, she synchronizes Piaf’s energy, eyes, body language, madness, tragedy, triumphs and outrageous humor until you are galvanized by her greatness. The veins in her neck bulge like helium whenever Piaf reaches a note that shatters, and she even inhales when Piaf does. The non-linear style can be jarring, but somehow, in the scope of Mr. Dahan’s direction and the range of Ms. Cotillard’s virtuosity, you always know where you are and what period it is in Piaf’s life. Example: You cut from the horrors of the bordello, filmed like Vermeer oils in half-lit shadows, as the young Édith is dragged away in a horse-drawn cart, to the stylish return from her celebrated American tour in a chauffeured limousine and her loud, vulgar toast at Maxim’s. Decades are wedged between, yet you know exactly where Piaf has been and where she’s heading. Her mentors, composers, lovers, and entourage of whores and pimps and junkies come and go like the fashions of the day, but Ms. Cotillard keeps her firmly in focus. One minute it’s 1963, the year of her death, and her head of carrot-colored fuzz is nearly bald; the next minute it’s 1936 and she’s young and promising and already full of too much champagne. “You’re playing with your life,” she is warned. “So what?” she spits back. “You have to play with something!” She’s a combination of Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, and although it’s not a new story, in the right hands it’s a goddamned electrifying one. From Raymond Asso, the cruel manager who made her wear black, taught her how to interpret lyrics, and catapulted her from cabaret to concert hall, to the spectacularly handsome boxer Marcel Cerdan, who taught her how to eat corned beef, sneak up the back stairs of the Plaza Hotel where the press couldn’t see them, and make the box springs moan—but refused to leave his wife—Piaf was used, abused, exploited and abandoned by everyone. There is one marvelous scene set in 1947, when she meets Marlene Dietrich, that whistles with the doom of what time can do to a woman with glamour and fame, followed by a sun-drenched day of palms and hypodermic needles in Hollywood (when she was up to 10 injections a day), as Piaf drives a convertible into a tree. The movie is so chock-full of details that it doesn’t matter how, where or when they occur, as long as they play themselves out with an artistry that is captivating. Nor does it matter how you end such a rich, rewarding achievement. Here, it is Piaf’s grand finale in 1960, hunched and bloodless as a vampire, her mouth a dark blood-red scar, miraculously pulling herself together to introduce a brand-new song, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” It became her theme song. You will leave this movie knowing why. The movie, the voice of Piaf, and a performance that turns Marion Cotillard into a great new star shimmer with the kind of beauty, power, intensity and visual opulence you might want to experience again and again.

Olivier Dahan’s La Vie En Rose, from a screenplay by Mr. Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman (in French with English subtitles), moved me as no other musical biopic has ever moved me—which is not to say that this overlong French production is a good, much less great, movie (soap opera, some might say). Others might complain that it wears its tender heart on its sleeve. No matter. Still, I myself would have wished that all the pungent and poetic French lyrics to Piaf’s songs had been given English subtitles. As it is, only her stirringly self-defining exit aria, “Non, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” is translated in the subtitles. It was this rousing anthem of a song that I used to play over and over again on café jukeboxes during my life-altering year in Paris in 1961, two years before Piaf died in her Riviera home from cancer at the age of 47. But sure enough, time and again, French students would make faces at my selection and play Elvis Presley recordings instead.

Mr. Dahan has wisely chosen to break up his mostly sad story of Piaf’s life and career into little pieces of time, flashing forward and backward, from the gutters of Pigalle, with Piaf as a pimp-driven street singer, all the way to her international eminence (though on the same life-as-art trajectory described by such lifelong torch-song casualties as Billie Holiday and Judy Garland). Born in the Belleville slum district of Paris in 1915, Piaf was abandoned by her parents at an early age and brought up in a brothel by her paternal grandmother until the day that her father, a street and circus contortionist, reclaimed her and made her his assistant—a job in which she worked until she could earn her own living as a street singer.

Marion Cotillard gives a highly charged, heavily made-up performance as the grown-up and decidedly unattractive Piaf, after an uncanny rendition of Piaf at age 5 by Manon Chevallier and age 10 by Pauline Burlet. The point is that it takes three fantastically intense incarnations of the Piaf persona to provide an existential chain of credibility in the torments of single life. Throughout all her travails, as the movie shows, Piaf couldn’t bear to be alone: Among the people to whom she clung was her loyal companion Mômone (Sylvie Testud), from her earliest street days; the very maternal prostitute Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner), who nurtured little Piaf through her near blindness; Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu), the café owner who gave Piaf her first big break; Louis Gassion (Jean-Paul Rouve), the stern taskmaster who forced Piaf to sing her lyrics with precise diction as well as tumultuous passion; and Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), the already-married middleweight boxing world champion and great love of her life, until he died in a plane crash in 1949. In between were two marriages, a small child who died from meningitis, and two near-fatal car crashes.

Surging through all these jumbled sequences of pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow, loss, recognition, rejection, applause, separation and reunion, the voice of Piaf singing on the soundtrack provides a triumphantly unifying thread of lyrical grandeur. One could be forgiven for imagining that Piaf’s story could be told in no other way to achieve the coherence and conviction it displays. But then I am probably prejudiced from a combination of nostalgia, Francophilia and Piaf-worship. All I can say is that the total experience left me in tears, albeit also with a feeling of total emotional exhaustion.

Francesca and B.

Band playing Scott Joplin, Motown, the Hora, everyone holding hands. A little Edith Piaf - La Vie en Rose- "C'est toi pour moi, moi pour toi dans la vie..."

B and I finally married and out the door now to revel in a two week honeymoon in Southern Spain. Ciao!

Belzebù is owned by Edoardo Sorrenti, a former fashion designer who was one of the original investors in the very trendy Boom restaurant in SoHo (and who also owns Boom Bistro in the Hamptons). Boom has probably changed since I last went there, so I won't go into the details of my experience five years ago. Let's just say that when I walked into Belzebù for the first time, I fully expected to be kept waiting at least an hour at the bar for my table.

The Belzebù bar is a short flight of steps down from the street, at the front of a long, narrow red-and-yellow dining room. On the night in question, a bartender was busy at work, though not pouring drinks or ringing up bills but polishing glasses. There was no sign of today's end-of-century cafe society; in fact, apart from the staff, not a soul was to be seen, either on the barstools or, indeed, in the entire restaurant.

"It's quite early yet," I said after we had checked our coats and taken our pick of the tables. "It's only 8:30-and after all, it is Monday."

The maître d', an attractive young man with a goatee and the impeccable English accent of a well-educated upper-class Frenchman, brought over the wine list, and we ordered a bottle of Sancerre rouge. Edith Piaf was belting out "Milord" and I suddenly felt like a schoolgirl again, sitting in a darkened room with some pimply youth, "quietly sweating palm to palm."

Normally, eating in an empty restaurant is rather depressing, but there was something about Belzebù that felt quite uplifting. The décor and ambiance in the dining room are delightful. It is warm and cozy, with mustard-colored walls that look as though they have been there since the 40's and booths with lipstick-red banquettes covered in gold stars. It is the sort of look that will only get better as it acquires a patina of use.

"It reminds me of a funky bar in Montmartre," said my husband. "One of those wonderful old dives that is always empty, with some dark-haired woman of indeterminate age behind the bar."

He turned to look at the picture on the wall behind him, which looked like a reproduction of a Tahitian scene by Paul Gauguin. "Look, brushstrokes," he exclaimed after a second. "It's actually a painting. How bizarre."

Overhearing him, the maître d', who was standing by our table, explained that the artist who had executed this and all the other works in the room (an impressive Impressionist collection that includes Vincent van Gogh, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet and more), was Riccardo Sorrenti, the brother of the owner.

Piaf was now emoting away to the tinkling strains of "Le vieux piano." Our friendly waiter, whose black wiglike hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses projected a look that was definitely more St. Mark's Place than Upper East Side, brought over a basket of bread and the menus.

The restaurant has two chefs, French and Italian, and the food is pretty evenly divided between the two cuisines. We began with tender sautéed squid in a vivid red bell-pepper broth, and snails, served not in their shells but fricasseed with tomatoes and mushrooms and stuffed inside a crisp pastry feuilletage. A crabcake appetizer was moist and flaky, and a salad of young spinach leaves tossed in a sesame and ginger dressing and topped with wakame seaweed was delicious.

Piaf the blind girl was singing as a couple slipped into one of the booths and our main courses arrived. (" T'es beau, tu sais … ") Roast duck marinated in honey and spices consisted of perfectly cooked pink slices with spinach and a delicate poached pear. Rare loin of venison with cranberry sauce was fine, too, as was the linguine with seafood in a garlicky tomato sauce and the grilled sea bass with fennel and tomato. We finished up with a terrific crème brûlée, a crispy apple tart with ice cream and the (for me) inevitable rich, molten chocolate cake.

Although there was nothing particularly original about this food, it was good, and we left feeling that we had made a discovery. Another night, when I came back with a friend, the place was busier, and we were seated back by the kitchen, out of which wafted the tantalizing smell of white truffles. Again Piaf was singing (" Les amants merveilleux, l'ecstase dans leurs yeux … "), but, alas, this time our experience was not so happy.

We should have had the truffles, for the food was not as tasty as before, beginning with a flavorless gravlax and a bland stuffed eggplant, and moving on to a thin, overcooked, sesame-crusted tuna steak and a dry, underseasoned red snapper. As we toyed with our main courses, "Milord" came on again.

"They really go in for Edith Piaf here, don't they?" said my friend, who was still recovering from a recent dinner party where the hostess had played a three-volume collection of the chanteuse. "By the end of the evening, I was ready to tear my hair out."

As if on cue, the music changed. "YMCA!" came the pulsing sound of the Village People. And our desserts-a creamy coconut flan and a warm apple tart-were delicious.

"I really like this place," said my friend, finishing the last morsel of apple tart.

I do, too. The only bedeviling thing about Belzebù is the inconsistency of the food. But arrive on the right night, and you can't help having a great time.

Belzebù

* 1/2

115 East 60th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenues

813-9344

Dress: Casual

Noise level: So far, so good

Wine list: Short and reasonably priced

Credit cards: American Express, Diners Club

Price range: Lunch main courses $10 to $17.50, dinner $15 to $24

Brunch: Saturday 11:30 A.M. to 4 P.M.

Lunch: Monday to Friday noon to 3:30 P.M.

Dinner: Monday to Saturday 5:30 P.M. to 12:30 A.M.

*: Good

* *: Very good

* * *: Excellent

* * * *: Outstanding

No star: Poor