Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: A great central performanceComment: I dont know about you but when I watch a movie I know when I have been impressed because time just flies by.'La Vie En Rose' is a movie that would have failed if the role of Edith Piaf had been badly played.Without question the performance of Marion Cotillard is fantastic and she fully deserved her best actress Oscar.It is a display of passion,desire,heartbreak and turmoil and it is brilliantly executed.Some of the scenes as Piaf enters old age are superb.I say old age but Piaf actually wasn't that old when she died but Cotillard captures her stoop,her fragillity fantastically well.
Customer Rating: Summary: Such a Great Lady betrayed into bigotryComment: This film had an enormous success when it came out and it was the winner of quite a few awards, Oscars and Caesars. But the DVD is already on sale, and at a dramatic low price. The film was well made, rich indeed and the actress did a fabulous composition to fit with her part, because it was only a part that was dictated by the author and director. All the nostalgic liked it for a short while because it was some music from a distant past but so few of Piaf's songs were actually performed, and in their entirety, that the film lost its nostalgic appeal very fast. But the worse was still to come because the composite portrait painted on this screen has little to do with the real woman. So many things are absent. Her deep connections with Jews during the war for one, and after the war for two, with her famous Exodus song. And the extremely devout Catholic mirage projected onto that woman is absurd, to the point of ignoring her last husband nearly totally, since he was a Greek Orthodox. The woman is betrayed into a neurotic even psychotic capricious clown that kills herself with morphine and other drugs, willfully and consciously out of foolishness, love seen as a derangement, and plain suicidal conduct. She wasn't that. She was warm, loving, extremely attentive to others and many other qualities that are ignored and even rejected so that she appears as a crazy Catholic that is attached, in the most derogative Buddhist meaning, to a cross and a Saint and Jesus. I was asked recently to produce a note on her "Jewishness" and I was embarrassed because in spite of all the links she had with Jews and Judaism and Israel, it is difficult to find in her life a real testimony about her religion, especially with her last marriage being in the Orthodox faith. And I think that this bigotry of the film explains why it is already nearly given away to anyone who wants to grab it. I personally feel betrayed by this film because I lived that period in a completely different light with widely accepted maybe untruths but magical and mythical stories about this great lady that has inspired so many other artists.
Customer Rating: Summary: the sparrow who sings in our heartComment: THE FRENCH SPARROW
Customer Rating: Summary: "Non, je ne regrette rien"Comment: The story of France's most beloved singer begins in 1918 in a squalid section of Paris. Little Edith is abandoned by her parents and goes to live in her grandmother's brothel. There, she becomes blind from an eye disease and is cared for by the prostitutes. When she recovers her sight, she is forced to join her father as a street performer. Her remarkable singing voice is noticed by a night club manager and she begins her meteoric climb to success, but it is tempered by a series of personal tragedies.
Customer Rating: Summary: I hated this film.Comment: Absolutely abhorrent. The narrative was poorly constructed with no real depth at any particular moment, no real exploration or any kind of binding motif or theme. It felt disjointed and trite - like a trailer for the life of Edith Piaf rather than any kind of real artistic representation or craft. Material haphazardly ordered, montage and ellipsis serially abused, the acting average. The screenplay was nothing special either, with some of the rare subtle nuances totally lost by the translation on the subtitles, which were dotted with Americanisms, no doubt to help the US audience get some of the jokes. Better to rely on your ears if you speak French.
![La Vie En Rose [2007]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51r1k%2BAw5HL._SL160_.jpg)
