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Piaf
comes alive: (l-r) Testud and Cotillard in La Vie
en Rose.
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She
Lived to Sing
By
Shawn Stone
La
Vie en Rose
Directed
by Olivier Dahan
More often than not, glossy bio pics of famous entertainers
are extravagantly pretty musicals or dramatic train wrecks.
Think De-Lovely, which ill-served both its subject
(Cole Porter) and lead actor (Kevin Kline) with horrendous
musical performances, or Beyond the Sea, which got
it improbably right in the singing and acting by director
Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin, and predictably wrong with a
hackneyed narrative structure.
La
Vie en Rose is, then, a wonderful rarity. This biography
of Edith Piaf is engrossing and dazzling. There’s already
Oscar talk about Marion Cotillard’s performance as Piaf, and
there should be. She presents the legendary French singer
with ferocity and grace, aging from a naïve teenager to a
middle-age woman so crippled by arthritis and the effects
of drug abuse that she looked 77, not 47. And, while it’s
Piaf on the soundtrack, Cotillard physically inhabits each
song’s performance. Piaf lived to sing, and Cotillard captures
this intensely; there’s a frightening scene when Piaf/Cotillard,
looking worse than a corpse, slowly comes alive to a new song
written expressly for her. (It’s the money scene that will
snag her that Oscar nod.)
Piaf’s early life was an epic of misery: Born during World
War I to a soldier father and neglectful mother, she was happy
only briefly, after the war, when her father, a circus contortionist,
deposited her with his mother. The fact that grandma
ran a whorehouse, and it was the whores who cared for little
Edith, is immaterial; it was the most loving home the poor
girl would ever know. Snatched back by her father, she spent
her childhood singing in the streets for small change.
While Piaf did earn fame and (some) fortune, her miserable,
deprived childhood left its mark. Wisely, then, writer-director
Olivier Dahan presents her life in cinematic shards. The director
shifts the action back-and-forth in time, almost from scene-to-scene;
the disruptions parallel Piaf’s drastic ups-and-downs, as
well as spare us from having to endure her long, miserable
decline in one long sequence.
There are other actors in the film. Sylvie Testud is first
jaunty, then disconsolate as Piaf’s friend Momone; Emmanuelle
Seigner is damaged-but-devoted as Titine, one of the prostitutes;
and Gérard Depardieu is suave in a cameo as Louis Leplée,
the club owner who discovered Piaf.
Still, La Vie en Rose is best appreciated and enjoyed
as a tour-de-force for Marion Cotillard, and, as such, is
one of the best films of the year.
Love
Story
A
Mighty Heart
Directed
by Michael Winterbottom
The story of the abduction and hor rific execution of Wall
Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has been told many
times; in the headlines of early 2002, and in the numerous
interviews with his widow, Mariane, and in her best-selling
memoir, A Mighty Heart. So the need for a movie adaptation
is debatable. Even after seeing this acutely well-made dramatization,
directed by the talented and versatile Michael Winterbottom,
I’m still not sure what value it has. What value, that is,
aside from bringing the story of a remarkable couple into
the wider pop-culture awareness.
And that is where its star, Angelina Jolie, comes in. To her
credit, she succeeds in channeling her own notorious glamour
into the far more earthbound glamour of Mariane Pearl. Jolie
doesn’t look like Mariane, but with her crimped hair, she
has the look of her, and under Winterbottom’s pitch-perfect
handling, she creates a compelling portrait that captures
both the fiery determination and inner reserve that must’ve
been needed to sustain Mariane during the four weeks between
her husband’s kidnapping and the irrefutable evidence of his
beheading. But Jolie is not the only centrifugal force in
the movie: the other one is Irrifan Khan as “the Captain,”
the feared chief of Pakistan’s counter- terrorism department.
A
Mighty Heart tells two stories, and they converge movingly
at its end. The first is a suspenseful (yes, even though the
outcome is known) police procedural on the efforts to find
Pearl (Dan Futterman) before his captors execute him. The
terrorists’ assertion that he’s a CIA spy is dismissed by
the international press fairly quickly; the fact that he’s
Jewish surfaces later. The film intersperses scenes of Daniel’s
last known whereabouts—he is abducted en route to interviewing
a militant cleric—with the confusion and chaos amidst the
various agencies and personnel who are trying to rescue him.
The captain is the wild card. Does he sympathize with anti-American
elements in Pakistan’s government? And since the Pearls’ close
friend and housemate, Asra (Archie Punjabi), is an Indian
journalist, will the local investigation be hampered by anti-Indian
sentiments?
Navigating the maze of terrorist activity is given a documentary-style
immediacy that deftly avoids polemics and politics while acknowledging
humanistic issues such as the poverty of Karachi and the Captain’s
use of torture to obtain information. Painful junctures are
handled with admirable sensitivity, such as the intimation
that Pearl had sensed something was wrong during his rendezvous
to meet with a militant cleric (he mispronounces one of his
contact’s names), yet didn’t heed his instincts, and the expression
on the faces of the personnel who first view the video of
Pearl’s beheading.
Mariane is buoyed by her pregnancy, and as hope dims, the
film moves backward in time and forward in optimism with scenes
of the Pearls’ idyllic marriage and expressions of their shared
commitment to truth, peace, and journalism. And though Mariane’s
refusal to give in to fear, hate, and despair is well documented,
it’s an outcome that deserves a wider audience.
—Ann
Morrow
Simply Scary
1408
Directed
by Mikael Hafström
Mikael Hafström’s unassuming little horror film, straightforwardly
adapted from a story by Stephen King, is a triumph of old-school
horror. After a transparently knowing prologue, 1408
takes the familiar night-in-a-haunted-house narrative and
concentrates it in one stuffy, creakingly genteel, and irredeemably
evil New York City hotel room.
No one, smooth and dapper hotel manager Gerald Olin (Samuel
L. Jackson) says, gets out of room 1408 alive. As he explains
in a cleverly drawn-out scene, the Dolphin Hotel’s “evil room”
has killed or maimed dozens of unhappy guests and staff in
the 90-plus years it has been open. And, of course, “the room”
has accomplished this in the most comically grisly ways imaginable—like
the tailor who slit his throat and then tried to sew it up
with needle and thread, or the man who drowned in a bowl of
chicken soup.
Since it’s King, the jokes are both obvious (1 + 4 + 0 + 8
= 13) and satisfying (corporate policy keeps the room from
being walled off). Even better, we can be reasonably sure
that the main character will have a troubled back-story that
will feed into whatever horror the filmmakers throw at him.
In this case, the “hero” is hacktastic writer Mike Enslin
(John Cusack), a once-promising novelist turned cynical chronicler
of “haunted” motels, hotels and bed-and-breakfast joints.
Enslin, against the best arguments and bribes of manager Olin,
checks into room 1408. And the fun begins.
The terror builds slowly, as the room and Enslin test each
other’s weaknesses, but quickly escalates into a bloody battle
of wits as a clock radio counts down 24 hours (and occasionally
blasts the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun”—another groaningly
funny King joke).
Not to give too much away, but Enslin’s problem is a familiar
theme—loss of faith—and this involves his estranged wife (Mary
McCormack) and daughter. The way this family unhappiness plays
out, however, involves a classic bit of misdirection. And
a haunted ending.
—Shawn
Stone
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