La Vie en Rose
Piaf's original recordings, a stand-in singer's voice, and brief orchestral passages by an English composer flow together, intermingling within one woman's memory.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people behind it ⏳🌊
- ComposerChristopher Gunning
An English composer known for his music for "Agatha Christie's Poirot," he won the BAFTA for film music for this film's score.
- DirectorOlivier Dahan
He conceived the film after looking through a book of Piaf photographs, and insisted on Cotillard for the lead to the very end.
- ScreenplayIsabelle Sobelman
With Dahan, she wrote the screenplay as a structure of memory that moves back and forth through time.
- StarringMarion Cotillard
For playing Piaf, she became the first to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for a French-language performance.
- ProducerAlain Goldman
The producer who heads Légende Films, he produced this film.
I. The English composer and the Paris sparrow
(Origins) Director Olivier Dahan is said to have conceived the film in January 2004 after coming across a book of Piaf photographs in a bookshop. He wrote the screenplay with Isabelle Sobelman. The first draft ran to 200 pages; the final version was cut to 140. Filming took place in 2006 in Paris, Prague and Los Angeles. The producers wanted Audrey Tautou, but Dahan held firm that it had to be Marion Cotillard. For this role Cotillard became the first to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for a French-language performance. (The composer) The score went to the English composer Christopher Gunning. Born in Cheltenham in 1944, he studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama under Edmund Rubbra and Richard Rodney Bennett. In Britain he was best known for his music for the series “Agatha Christie's Poirot,” starring David Suchet. One critic wrote that Dahan's choice of an Englishman was unexpected, since Gunning had not scored a film of this scale in nearly a decade, not since “Firelight.” How he came to take on the project is not recorded in any detail in the public record. (Structure) The film's music comes in three layers. The first is Piaf's own original recordings; the second, songs sung in her place by Jil Aigrot, who was recommended by Piaf's former secretary Ginou Richer; the third, Gunning's orchestral score. Cotillard lip-synced most of the singing, and about the only song she sang herself was the brief “Frou-frou.” In 2008 Gunning won the BAFTA for Best Film Music for this score. “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016), also covered in this series, is likewise a biopic about a singing woman, but Piaf's voice stands at the opposite pole from that film's heroine.
II. The streets of Belleville
(Childhood) The story begins in Belleville, a poor neighborhood in the east of Paris. Her mother, a street singer, could not look after the child, and her father, an acrobat gone off to war, left his daughter with her grandmother, who kept a brothel in Normandy. The film does not recount these years in order. Instead, the memories of a dying Piaf light upon them, moving back and forth between this time and the years that followed. (The brothel) The women of the brothel cherished the child. One of them, Titine, played by Emmanuelle Seigner, becomes something like a mother to her. When an eye infection leaves the girl blind, the women take her to Lisieux to pray to Saint Thérèse. Here Gunning's “Lisieux” plays. The cue does not paint the brothel coldly; it paints it as a warm refuge seen through a child's eyes. (The circus) When her father returns and takes her away, the child enters the world of traveling circuses and street performance. One day, when he cannot draw a crowd, her father tells her to do something, anything. She sings “La Marseillaise.” The child actress Pauline Burlet lip-synced the song, with the voice supplied by Cassandre Berger. This moment, the first time Piaf sings in the film, passes without accompaniment amid the noise of the street. (Sound) The music of this chapter is quiet. Cues such as “Childhood” and “Circus Waltz,” included on the 2022 expanded edition, are short and light. The true protagonists of this chapter are not the orchestra but the street sounds surrounding the child and a voice that does not yet have a name. Gunning's music stays in the background, as if keeping room open for that voice to enter.
The cue that plays as the women of the brothel take the blind child to pray to Saint Thérèse. It wraps in music the first care the child has ever known.
- Though the scene shows a brothel, the music is not dark; it sounds like a fairy tale. This is the world seen not through an adult's eyes but through a child's.
- A cue that brings out the texture of piano and soft chorus that critics singled out as the score's French coloring.
- On the 2022 expanded edition, an opening section was added under the title “The Kid / Lisieux,” stretching it to about 3 minutes 30 seconds. It is worth comparing with the original album version.
III. The voice of Pigalle
(Discovery) As a teenager, Édith lives by singing in the streets of Montmartre and Pigalle with her best friend Simone, known as Momone. Louis Leplée, owner of the cabaret Gerny's, hears her voice and puts her on stage. It was he who gave her the stage name La Môme Piaf, meaning 'the little sparrow.' The film's French title, “La Môme,” comes from this nickname. (Early years) The songs heard in this period belong to her early repertoire, such as “Les Mômes de la Cloche,” sung by Jil Aigrot. The sound is deliberately unpolished, rough and raw. The film's scene of her first stage triumph drops almost all of the singing and runs on images alone, cutting between the singer and the audience. One critic called it the best sequence in the film. (Death) When Leplée is murdered, her life is shaken once more. Leplée was played by Gérard Depardieu. Piaf is questioned by the police, and the press suspects her. Here Gunning's theme “Mon Légionnaire” first reveals its weight as a piano solo. The melody returns in the cues “La Mort de Leplée” and “The Arrest.” (Training) The one who then takes her in hand is the lyricist Raymond Asso. Asso teaches her diction, gesture and her whole approach to singing from scratch. The cue “L'ABC” on the soundtrack connects, as its title suggests, to this process of relearning from the basics. In this chapter the voice of the street becomes the voice of the stage.
Early repertoire from the days when she moved between the street and the cabaret; in the film it is sung from beginning to end in Jil Aigrot's voice. It is also one of the first songs the real Piaf put on record.
- This is not Piaf's original recording but one by her stand-in singer, Jil Aigrot. It was chosen to recreate the young voice before it was polished.
- The song is told in the first person by poor girls of the street speaking about themselves. It mirrors exactly the situation of Édith, drifting about with Momone.
- Compare it with the later “L'Hymne à l'amour” or the songs of the final chapter, and you can hear how the same singer's voice is refined into a voice for the stage.
When Leplée, who discovered Édith, is murdered, Gunning's theme reveals its weight on the piano. The melody returns later in the arrest scene.
- This short melody returns again and again: in the piano solo, at Leplée's death, in the arrest scene. It is used like a short melody repeated to point to a particular emotion or character, that is, a leitmotif.
- One critic described the theme as a solemn, dignified piano solo and linked it to the private tragedy of Piaf's life.
- The title comes from the 1936 chanson of the same name by Raymond Asso and Marguerite Monnot. How much of the original melody Gunning borrowed, you can gauge by listening to the two side by side.
- Because it drops the orchestra and is played on a single piano, it sounds like the place of someone left alone behind a glittering stage.
IV. Love across the Atlantic
(New York) After the war, Piaf goes to America. At first American audiences find this small French singer strange, but little by little she establishes herself in New York. As the titles of cues on the expanded edition such as “American Dream,” “New York Bar” and “Jazz in Manhattan” suggest, Gunning blends in a touch of jazz color for this period, aiming for an air different from the accordion of Paris. (Cerdan) In New York, Piaf meets the boxer Marcel Cerdan. Cerdan, played by Jean-Pierre Martins, was a married man with a family. Of all her lovers, the film focuses on him alone. Gunning's “L'Idylle,” which plays when the two are together, is the most unguardedly tender music in the film. (The fight) At the heart of this chapter is the bout in which Cerdan defeats Tony Zale to become world middleweight champion. The song this love left behind is “L'Hymne à l'amour.” Piaf wrote the lyrics herself and Marguerite Monnot set them to music; it is known as the song Piaf dedicated to Cerdan. (Foreboding) The film proceeds on the premise that the audience already knows this happiness will not last. Even while covering this period, the music never lets its joy out in full. Beneath the warm harmonies of “L'Idylle” runs a faint tension that could snap at any moment.
A song born of the love between Piaf and Cerdan. It is known as the song Piaf dedicated to Cerdan.
- Piaf wrote the lyrics herself, and Marguerite Monnot composed the music. It is a song in the manner of a prayer, vowing to do anything for the one she loves.
Gunning's cue enfolding the brief time Piaf and Cerdan spend together, and the gentlest music in the whole film.
- An idyll (牧歌) originally meant a poem or piece of music celebrating the peaceful life of the countryside. The title seeks to paint a brief, happy love affair like a tranquil landscape.
- If the earlier “Mon Légionnaire” was spare solo piano, this cue opens out with added strings. It sounds as though, for that moment at least, Piaf is not alone.
- The expanded edition adds more New York–era cues around “L'Idylle,” such as “Seduction” and “Saint-Germain in New York,” so the music of this period can be heard as a single flow.
V. The crumbling stage
(The news) In 1949 Cerdan is killed in a plane crash on his way to New York to see Piaf. The sequence in which Piaf takes in the news was shot as a single long take, the camera following her without a cut. She wanders through rooms and corridors, passes through a curtain onto the stage, and there begins to sing. This seam, where grief flows straight into performance, compresses into one scene the way Piaf turned her wounds into song. (The fall) The film then shows her decline through a string of car accidents, dependence on painkillers and collapses on stage. Though Piaf is barely past forty, her body stoops like an old woman's on screen. Cotillard had her hairline and eyebrows shaved and sat in makeup for up to five hours a day. Oversized furniture was brought onto the sets to make her look smaller. The film also won an Academy Award for makeup. (Silence) Here Gunning's score actually recedes. The music does not prop up the emotion; instead, scattered fragments of memory flicker by in turn without sound. As we saw in chapter 1, each time Piaf's original recordings come in, the audience is reminded anew that the voice is still alive. (A new song) To the weakened Piaf come the composer Charles Dumont and the lyricist Michel Vaucaire with a new song. That song is “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” a resolute declaration, looking back on a life lived, that she regrets nothing. Piaf takes the song and resolves to return for one last great stage.
The last great song the failing Piaf took up, it plays in her own recording on the Olympia stage at the film's close.
- Charles Dumont wrote the music and Michel Vaucaire the lyrics. It is a resolute declaration that she will wipe away everything past and begin again.
- The march-like accompaniment, striking out each beat like a drum, stands in contrast to the broken body. The song sounds as if it stands stronger than the person on screen.
- The film splices the song together with the stage, the deathbed, and a memory it has kept hidden. And so the same song arrives with a weight unlike the triumph of a first hearing.
- Cotillard lip-synced this scene to the original recording. Critics singled it out as the summit of her performance, a scene in which the voice seems to lead the body.
VI. The last song at the Olympia
(The stage) The film ends at the Olympia in Paris. Piaf, barely able to stand, walks onstage and sings “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The voice we hear is Piaf's own recording. Cotillard's gestures move to that voice. One critic, watching the scene, wrote that Piaf's music seemed to be moving Cotillard's body. (Crosscutting) As the song goes on, the screen moves between the Olympia stage, the deathbed, and a fragment of memory the film has not shown until now. The film has saved this last memory for the very end. What it is, you are better off seeing for yourself. But the moment the song's resolute declaration settles over that memory, the words “I regret nothing” sound less like a cry of victory than a confession about a life borne to the end. (The final night) “Dernière Nuit,” which Gunning wrote for this passage, runs 7 minutes 30 seconds, the longest of his cues for the film. Where most of the other cues are miniatures of little more than 1–2 minutes, this one gathers the themes heard earlier and unfolds them at length across the full orchestra. Critics, too, name this cue the most sweeping piece in the score. (Afterglow) When the film is over, what remains in the end is Piaf's voice. From the start, Gunning's music never tried to overpower it. Because it held back in almost every scene before, those final seven minutes of orchestral writing land with all the more weight.
A 7-minute-30-second cue written for the film's final passage, in which Gunning's score, built mostly of short miniatures, opens out at length across the full orchestra for the first time.
- Where most of the earlier cues ran 1–2 minutes, this one lasts more than seven. It is built to pour out, all at once at the end, the music that had been held in reserve.
- One critic called it the only piece in a light, gentle score that sweeps grandly and carries the weight of tragedy. It shows better than anything why Gunning won the BAFTA.
- When the earlier themes return, recall the scenes in which they first appeared, and the music seems to summon memories one by one.
- The 2022 expanded edition also includes, after this piece, 6 minutes of end-credits music.
Lesser-known stories
(The stand-in) Jil Aigrot, who sang many of Piaf's songs in the film, was not chosen by audition. Ginou Richer, Piaf's longtime secretary, heard Aigrot sing at a book signing and recommended her to the filmmakers. Audiences tend to remember only Cotillard on screen and Piaf on the original recordings, so the third voice that bridged them survives only in the credits. (The album) The 2007 soundtrack was originally planned as a two-disc set, one disc of score and one of songs. But when it was cut down to a single disc, only twenty-odd minutes of Gunning's music made it on. The remaining forty-plus minutes of score went unreleased for 15 years. In 2022 the French label Music Box Records gathered this music into an expanded edition limited to 500 copies. The titles of cues that flash by briefly in the film, such as “Circus Waltz” and “Jazz in Manhattan,” were made public for the first time then. (The symphonies) To film-music fans Gunning is remembered as a composer for television and film, but between 2001 and 2020 he completed thirteen symphonies. He recorded several of them himself, conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Long-breathed orchestral writing like “Dernière Nuit” seems not unrelated to his absorption in the symphony around the time he took on this film. He died in 2023, and at a memorial concert in London the following year his Symphony No. 10 was performed.
Glossary 📚🔎
Score (film music)
(Meaning) The English word score originally meant to cut a line or notch a mark. It came to refer to the full score, in which the parts for many instruments are written stacked in aligned staves, and from there it took on the sense of music newly written for a film. (In film·musical-theater music) In film, the score means not preexisting songs but the background music a composer writes anew to fit the scenes. In La Vie en Rose, Piaf's songs are the soundtrack, and the orchestral music Christopher Gunning wrote is the score. It is like the difference, in a school play, between the accompaniment playing under the dialogue and the song a friend sings live onstage. (Elsewhere) In sports, the score means the points in a game.
Cue
(Meaning) The English word cue means a signal telling an actor to take the next action. (In film·musical-theater music) In film music, a cue is a single segment of music with a fixed start and end, written for one scene or passage. Short cues of 1–2 minutes, like “Lisieux” or “The Death of Leplée,” add up to a whole score. It is like a field day, where one piece of music is set for the start of a race and another for the awards ceremony. Each of those is a cue. (Elsewhere) In billiards, the stick used to strike the ball is also called a cue.
Leitmotif (leading motive)
(Meaning) The German Leitmotiv means a leading (leiten) motive (Motiv). The name itself holds the idea that the music leads the audience's thoughts toward a certain character or idea. (In film·musical-theater music) A short melody that recurs whenever a particular character, emotion, or event appears. Used systematically in Wagner's operas, it has since become a basic technique of film music. In this film, the melody of “Mon légionnaire” returns again and again at Leplée's death and the arrest scene, pointing to loss. When the same music always plays just before a boss appears in a video game, you know what is about to happen without even looking at the screen. That is what a leitmotif does.
Lip sync
(Meaning) The English lip sync means matching (synchronize) the lips (lip) to sound. (In film·musical-theater music) A method in which an actor performs only the mouth shapes and gestures to a song recorded in advance. Cotillard lip-synced most of the songs to Piaf's original recordings or to Jil Aigrot's. It is harder than it looks, because the breaths and the moments the mouth opens must not drift from the sound. Try mouthing along to a singer's video on a karaoke screen and you will see that being even half a beat late gives you away at once.
Chanson
(Meaning) The French chanson simply means song. It comes from the Latin cantare, to sing. (In film·musical-theater music) Outside France, chanson usually refers to twentieth-century French popular song, especially songs that prize the story in the lyrics and the singer's expressiveness. Piaf is the singer who epitomizes the genre. Her songs put their weight less on a beautiful melody than on telling one person's story. Just as, when a friend vividly recounts something that happened to them, you get caught up more in how they tell it than in what they say, in chanson the heart of the matter is how the singer delivers the song.
Arrangement
(Meaning) Pyeongok (編曲), the Korean word for arrangement, means to weave (編) a tune (曲). (In film·musical-theater music) The work of leaving an existing melody as it is while devising anew which instruments will play it and with what harmonies and rhythms. Gunning did not just write his own score; he also arranged many of the Piaf songs used in the film to suit it. As with “La Vie en rose – Accordion” at the end of the soundtrack, the same song takes on an entirely different mood when the instruments change. It is a bit like how the same instant ramen tastes different depending on what you add to it.
Waltz
(Meaning) The German Walzer comes from walzen, to turn round and round. The name comes from a dance in which couples turn as they dance. (In film·musical-theater music) Music in which a group of three beats, one-two-three, repeats with the weight on the first beat. Gunning's first cue, “Awakening,” sounds like a fairy-tale waltz, while “Circus Waltz” and “Waltz of the Outskirts” on the expanded edition evoke the dance tunes of the Paris streets. Jump rope counting three, oom-pah-pah, and you can feel the waltz's beat in your body. (Elsewhere) In figure skating, the waltz jump is the most basic jump, taking off forward and making a half turn.