American Cinematographer - June 2007 - 18

Production Slate Turbulent Lives 18 June 2007 La Vie en Rose photos by Bruno Calvo, courtesy of Picturehouse. Nagata photo courtesy of Nagata. In a scene from La Vie en Rose, Édith Piaf (Marion Cotillard) enjoys a rendezvous with her lover, Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins), only to discover moments later that she imagined his presence. High and Low Notes by John Calhoun Though it lasted a mere 47 years, the life of French chanteuse Édith Piaf was so packed with drama and turbulence that representing its different stages in a single film biography was an ambitious undertaking. Writer/director Olivier Dahan’s La Vie en Rose (titled La Môme in France), which stars Marion Cotillard as Piaf, attempts to cover the singer’s story from childhood to death, but in a nonlinear fashion and with many years of her life elided. (Those who want to know about her French Resistance activities during World War II or her affairs with fellow luminaries such as Yves Montand should look elsewhere.) From the starting point of her final days, Dahan zeroes in on three key periods of Piaf’s life: her childhood years, spent in a brothel in the Belleville section of Paris; her poverty- stricken early adulthood in the 1930s, when she sang on the streets of Pigalle; and the peak of her success in the 1940s and ’50s, when she lost the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan. Director of photography Tetsuo Nagata, AFC, a Japanese native who has been based in France for 25 years, was familiar with Piaf’s music before signing on to shoot La Vie en Rose, but not so well acquainted with the particulars of her life. “I’d met Olivier Dahan but had never worked with him,” adds Nagata, who won a César Award for La Chambre des officiers in 2002. “He called me for this project, and when I read the script I thought it was really good.” The cinematographer worked closely with the director and art department to give each of the film’s periods its own visual flavor. This was especially important because the narrative structure scrambles the chronology of events. (In the produc- tion notes, Dahan said he “wanted to intertwine various periods, skipping from one period to another by associating ideas or images, like when memories flash through your mind.”) Nagata says he envisioned the chapters of Piaf’s life primarily in terms of color. “Flashbacks can cause confusion when there are many different time periods, so I wanted to use the color and texture of the image to help distinguish the period,” he says. “The first period, when she’s very young and very poor, features dark, cold colors, mainly gray and blue; I even thought of making it black-andwhite but decided that would stand out too much.” The Pigalle period is keyed in warm colors, echoing the predominant red of a bar she frequents. For the postwar period, when Piaf embarked on a triumphant American tour, Nagata mainly uses golden tungsten light, and for her later years, he returns to the grays and
American Cinematographer - June 2007

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