Week Of April 16, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri

April 18, 2007

A Little Sparrow Of A Different Color

Marion Cottilard is stunningly beautiful. 

That was my first impression when I walked into the room to talk to Ms. Cotillard and director Olivier Dahan about their film about Edith Piaf, called La Vie En Rose here in the U.S.

Beauty is an interesting thing in this business. Cotillard, in particular, is one of those women whose greatest beauty is hard to capture on film, still or moving. After years of observing this phenomenon, I think it has a lot to do with the eyes. Oddly, the first time I really noticed this was with Jim Belushi, who I was acquainted with back in my NY days and who has surprisingly light blue eyes. But I would have never known that from his movies. And then, I think it was Red Heat, where his eye color was actually captured on camera. I don't know whether it's ever happened again, as I am not one to watch much Jim Belushi product. But with all the importance placed on the eyes in filmmaking, it is still head-turning to me how many actors are never captured accurately in that regard.

In the case of Ms. Cotillard, you start with a face of some unusually strong but soft angles and then get to her eyes, which are surrounded, like Susan Sarandon's, with an unexpected wave of skin. This can be shot to various effects. But in person, the effect is much gentler. And the glow of her skin in real life is truly remarkable ... something suggested in he way she was lit in Love Me If You Dare, but never captured quite exactly. Perhaps it is not meant to be. 

She is slight but not small. Her simple pale green dress suggests curves that a journalist dare not get caught trying to see better. As when confronted by any great beauty, the male instinct is to do a physical inventory. But not at work. Not when one is there to discuss a likely-to-be Oscar nominated work. Not when one wants to show the deference that her talent and her beauty deserve. 

She goes out of her way to be polite to everyone who wanders in an out of the room. And after a couple of minutes, this includes her director, Olivier, who she greets sweetly. He's feeling a bit under the weather but he joins us, as I requested, and jumps right in.

It took him a year to write the script for the movie. He read everything he could about Piaf. He wrestled with all the possibilities. But he sought, ultimately, to offer a poetic version of her story and not a classic biopic. And when he was done, he would shoot that first draft. 

Dahan decided that he wanted Cotillard to play this role, though at first he was the only one who saw her as a fit.. Even though her looks might be laughable, unphotographable, her rep as a beauty and as an actress had already drawn Ridley Scott into hiring her to be the love interest -- an object of passion as powerful as Provence itself -- for A Good Year. (Yes, I left little mines on the conversational table for her on that one ... no, she never took the opportunity to say a dark or dubious word.) His passion convinced her. The way she tells it, his relentless belief quickly turned her into a believer in her ability to do this part.

It's fascinating, because talking to Olivier, he is very open about his lack of knowledge about Piaf and then his interest in Piaf as an icon. He also talks a lot, without using the diagnostic phrase, about his ADD. He can't, he says, stay focused for more than 20 minutes. And so, his work is built on making the most of what might be seen as a fault. Both things show clearly in his movie. The film jumps through time like a big fish on a tiny boat. For an audience that doesn't have an attention disorder it is, at times, almost unpleasantly demanding. But then, remarkably, comes together in the third act, the discordant strings playing beautifully as one. 

What keeps us, as an audience, going through the hard times (which are much easier a second time around), is the powerful intimacy of the performances, led by Cotillard. And this is where they both seem to live. Dailies? Not only doesn't she watch them, HE doesn't watch them. How did he work with her on the set? "I don't work with her on the set. I don't work on the set."  Cottillard watched every bit of footage of Piaf she could get her hands on, including Super 8 home movies, in preparing. But did the director? "I read the books. She looked at the video, not me. That was her area. I did mine. She did hers."  

There are so many young directors and other show bizzers who are constantly building images of themselves for the press and the world. But there is a rawness to Dahan that stripped me of my cynicism. No doubt, it seems, he could be very difficult to work with. One could imagine that his way of doing things, on a troubled show, could be painful. But here, it seems to have been a perfect storm.

Language is hard, even though both of the duo on the Four Seasons couch speak very good English. But I am a colloquialist, especially when I am trying to evoke a response instead of asking a specific question. This is all by way of explanation, perhaps, of why Cotillard sometimes seemed quite young in our chat, even though her eyes and her performance speak to an aged worldliness. She still speaks of her art and the search for truth and meaning in it with no hint of cynicism ... no weariness at all. When she talks about working with Tim Burton, unprompted, she nearly bursts at the seams with the exuberance of being able to play in his big box of Crayolas in a fairly small role in Big Fish.  He is her directorial idol.

So perhaps it is I who am the cynic.

The whole experience of sitting with these two kept me in mind of a recent TV experience that has really stuck with me. On Showtime, Fenton & Barbato have yet another dirty doc series, this one focusing specifically on the production of a remake of the porn classic Debbie Does Dallas. But what has struck me as fascinating is that at the same time Paul Thomas is shooting an arty, but basically mainstream porn film, the company paying for it also decided to also make what is called and "atl-porn" version of the film, masterminded by some kid just out of film school or art school or wherever, filled with tattoos and piercings and extra grimy dirty stuff. 

What fascinates me about this is the idea of cinema as an art form, which is not how it's been respected over these last 100 years, and the idea of "alt-cinema."  We who cover film tend to put films like Chinatown, for instance, on a holy altar of the untouchable. And indeed, the notion of a mainstream studio remake does sicken me. But I would love to see some "alt cinema" kid take on that material with a fresh view and a low budget and an interest in mining the ideas of Chinatown. 

I would love to see "alt-musicals."  And I mean with a more traditional base than something like Hedwig & The Angry Inch. No one is ever going to make Carousel again as a feature. It's just not going to happen anytime in the next 20 years, if ever. For one thing the story structure is slight. But the ideas are intense and some of the songs are truly spectacular and forever. Break the genre. Reorchestrate the music. Add drugs and/or sex if you wish. It's an epic, Shakespearian tale. Why not allow it the life of cinema rather than bury it in cement?

And that is, on reflection and after a meeting, a bit of what La Vie En Rose feels like. Oliver Dahan feels like a young, renegade artist playing to his own tune. Marion Cotillard feels like a young, fresh, deeply passionate and even slightly reckless actress with the guts to do the insane. (Compared to Nicole Kidman stretching to do Virginia Wolfe or Reese Witherspoon singing and dancing at June Carter Cash, the reach of her performance here is epic. And the career risk of a foreign actress, no matter how beautiful in real life, being hung with this performance as a somewhat unattractive, odd sounding, raging, pained woman who looks like 70 at 44, is real.)

Of course, what is really surprising about a film coming out of this "alt" reality is that it looks fairly classical. It is not a streaked framed, grimy mess or overly eager to turn the camera into an E-ticket ride. But that is the ultimate thrill ... to push the edge and to also be able to deliver in a recognizable, traditionally accessible way. 

You never know at the start how far talented people will get. It's a brutal business and dangers lurk everywhere. Just as Piaf's biographers. But there is a real joy when the slot machine comes up "jackpot, jackpot, jackpot."  It is hope for another day, another week, another year.

La Vie En Rose will not be everyone's cup of champagne. And the experience of the work of Dahan & Cotillard is more subtle than my exuberance about it. But there is something about the passion, the lack of marketing in their eyes, and the hope ... the hope.

And the blue eyes ... so big and of a color I've never quite seen before in nature ... not bad either.

E Me.

---

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