La Vie en Rose

It was an overcast day, a little breezy. I had never walked through a cemetery on my own before, and I wasn’t sure how long I was going to last. My imagination always gets the better of me in these settings, but I was on a mission: to find the resting place of the celebrated French singer, Edith Piaf, France’s ‘Little Sparrow’.

Standing in front of her silent grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris, was an ironic experience for this self-confessed Francophile. Reflecting on the life of the woman with a voice above and beyond her tiny frame in such a quiet place was an eerie feeling.

Watching the film La Vie en Rose, was a different experience altogether. Olivier Dahan’s account of the turbulent life of the petite Parisienne with the distinctively powerful voice takes us into the world she knew, both in France and America. If you like rags to riches stories – you will love this one. Piaf had a truly fascinating – and tragic – life.

Born in 1915 to a circus acrobat and a street singer, Piaf’s childhood included sickness, poverty and, quite possibly, feelings of displacement. It is in this setting that we are introduced to her ‘patron saint’ – Saint Therese – to whom Edith prays at crucial moments in her life. This is a mystical and somewhat unpredictable being, who watches over Edith, appearing and disappearing, sometimes answering her prayers, sometimes not. 

Our God embodies some of these characteristics – indeed we are called to walk in faith, especially when we cannot see or understand His ways. I do not know the details of Piaf’s faith. But it is sad to think that it might simply have been one in which she took refuge in difficult times. 

La Vie en Rose gives us a glance behind the curtain at Piaf’s heart. It is a great shame that the love of Piaf’s life, the handsome boxing champion Marcel Cerdan was a married man with a family, who was to die tragically en route to visiting her in New York. Although it seems she looked towards a hopeless future with Cerdan, she was besotted, and seems never to have fully recovered. I was surprised to find little mention of her husbands, particularly her last husband who from all accounts I have read, doted on her in her final days. Her work with the French Resistance also receives little mention, as does her young daughter Marcelle.

Marion Cotillard (A Good Year) shows us an Edith as turbulent as her lifestyle. A heavy drinker and smoker, Piaf struggled with addiction throughout much of her career. The characteristically pencilled eyebrows, eye-stopping red lipstick and long-sleeved black dress are unmistakable as is her signature singing stance: standing square, feet apart, hands on hips and elbows back. Her mood changes at the snap of a finger from giggles and guffaws to tears and tantrums. She is loud, unaffected, awkward. She is both obnoxious and fragile – she conquers the stage, but then cowers behind it. But at times she also reveals a girlish charm and a touch of the joie de vivre for which the French are so well-known.

While it seems Piaf initially had to be taught to infuse her songs with emotion, in her prime, she appears to have taken her gusto, her excitement, and her grief to the stage, letting them resonate through her voice unabashedly.

The film is a little dizzying as it swings back and forth from Edith’s childhood to her ‘heyday’ as a singing star, to a young invalid, to a frail woman who would die of cancer at 47. But the bizarre mixture of dates and scenes helps to convey the ‘chaos’ of Piaf’s life.

La Vie en Rose takes a wide-eyed audience into the boisterous and colourful world of Paris theatres in the ‘40s and ‘50s. This is a world full of beautiful people, exquisite sounds and delicious sights. But it was a world in which Piaf struggled. Overwhelmed with excess, the ugly side shows through the high life’s glitzy sheen as we see Piaf hobbling on stage unwell and in pain, sometimes trembling with stage fright.

How many of us have wondered what it might be like to walk the boards of a world-renowned stage as a star, or perhaps a well-groomed cricket pitch or soccer stadium? Piaf experienced the extreme highs of movie star success and lived an exorbitant life at times, with almost anything her heart desired. And yet the film portrays her as a woman who clung to the idea of a being watching over her, to whom she could call when in distress.

It occurred to me as I watched the film that we are ripped off if our experience of faith is simply calling for help when we are in trouble. God’s command to us is to love him “with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength”. This is as much for our benefit as for His glory. He is not a distant God whom we call when in need and leave alone when we’re taking out the garbage or cleaning our teeth. He is a God we can trust and know every minute of our lives, a God who cares about even the mundane details we take for granted. How much we would miss if we picked up our Bibles only in times of trial, for we can call on Him always, not just when we need Him most.

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