SFIFF 50: La Vie En Rose (Closing Night) May 10, 2007

This event marks the Closing Night festivities of the 50th annual San Francisco International Film Festival.

About the film, La Vie En Rose:

The ferocious talent and indomitable spirit of legendary chanteuse Edith Piaf is celebrated in this French feast of a biopic, featuring a stunning performance by Marion Cotillard as the "little sparrow" who lived, loved and sang with no regrets. A huge hit in France and winner of five Césars, La Vie en Rose arrives on these shores with its uniquely Gallic blend of onstage triumph, backstage tragedy and tempestuous melodrama intact. Skillfully sifting time periods, far-flung locales and extremes of mood and imagery, director Olivier Dahan delivers far more than the standard biopic. Jumping with emotional, if not sequential, logic among pivotal periods in Piaf's life—from her Balzacian childhood as the daughter of a circus acrobat and alcoholic prostitute, her upbringing in a brothel and her discovery by nightclub owner Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) to her passionate affair with boxer Marcel Cedan, years of drug addiction and a hallucinatory final night in Grasse—the film indulges its heroine’s unquenchable thirst for life, love and experience. Marion Cotillard, recently seen opposite Russell Crowe in A Good Year, undergoes an astonishing physical transformation and bravely navigates extreme highs and lows to fully embody Piaf, right down to the arched eyebrows, prominent front teeth and wild-eyed, almost feral fierceness with which she approached her relationships and art. "There’s more to life than songs," best friend Mômone (Sylvie Testud) insists, but to this brilliant interpreter of "Milord," "Mon Dieu," and "Non, je ne regrette rien," songs mean more than life itself. By the time Dahan and Cotillard present Piaf at her final concert at L’Olympia, with Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour and Jean Cocteau in attendance and the whole world waiting to hear that tremulous vibrato, La Vie in Rose has reached a pinnacle of emotion befitting the ultimate diva. C’est formidable!

Official Website: http://fest07.sffs.org/films/film_details.php?id=115