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La Vie en Rose, Directed by Olivier Dahan
La Môme, TF1 International, February 8, 2007 (France)
Screenplay: Olivier Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman
Starring: Marion Cotillard and Sylvie Testud
Die right now. Imagine.
Journalist (Paulina Bakarova): If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
Edith Piaf (Marion Cotillard): Love.
Journalist: To a young girl?
Edith: Love.
Journalist: To a child?
Edith: Love.
If, moments before the final curtain, life flashes before one’s eyes, then what exactly will be revealed? Go ahead. Die right now. Imagine the moment. Listen to your heart fade against the closing silence. What is it that you see? Who do you see? Where are you? Thoughts of love? Pain? Is it a tragedy that plays out before you? Triumph? Are the illuminations laid out neatly in chronological order, from A to Z?
Your tiny eyes strain to open as they are first exposed to the piercing brightness. The hands of giants delicately pass you back and forth. Holding you as you squirm. There you are, with your fingers and face (even your hair) suddenly coated completely in creamy sugary sweetness, just after the voices sang out in your direction and the flame burned and danced atop the white frosted mountain of euphoria. You grew so fast! Learned to ride a bike. Learned to fall. It was the same bike that was wrapped in a big red bow next to the Christmas tree that still lights up your memories. There was preschool and middle school and high school too, and somewhere in between, that inevitable first kiss or the time you turned into a zombie and held your mother’s hand inside a place called a funeral parlor, and you didn’t understand any of it. Why was the room so stale? Why weren’t sobbing like all the rest of them? Why you were so afraid?
Where are you now?
The linear two-dimension graphic fails miserably. Life cannot be adequately captured on a neat timeline that lists, chronologically, nothing more than facts—fragile inked bullet points aligned in perfect sequence. The beauty of the human condition is far more abstract than born on dates can ever hope to convey.
The soul is a mosaic. Its true essence is in the fragments—pieces strewn together that alone could never show the whole. What is more, the order of the fragments is completely irrelevant. In the end, the shards of shiny sparkling colors meld together in a prism that releases brilliant arrays in all directions. It is a streaming rush that is configured by nature, not time.
The light—the moments—race down the rapids, intersecting, splashing, and crashing into one another, coming into view, dipping under, out of focus, moving toward the end at incomprehensible speeds, before, at long last … hurling over the edge in a shocking display of power and unspeakable beauty. The waterfall’s edge is life and death.
Here, in the plunging finish, there is no separation of A, B, or Z. And in this magical explosion of all that is gloriously revealed, you will catch a glimpse of your mosaic—the wonders of it all—a burst of images, your essence, and it will be locked safely and forever, for eternity.
Die right now and you will see.
-G
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