Marion Cotillard In “La Vie En Rose” and “INCEPTION”

Marion Cotillard is rocking my world right now.  I really liked her in “INCEPTION” and had always heard about her portrayal of Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose” but never actually saw the film.  I took it as a poetic sign from above that it was time to see the movie when I noticed that Edith Piaf’s song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” was used as a pivotal element of the story.  Regret is a huge part of the story of “INCEPTION” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s own regrets about what happened between him and his wife Mal (played by Marion Cotillard) end up having a detrimental effect on his life and the life of his team members as they go deeper and deeper into the realm of the human mind and his own subconscious.  The song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” is used by the team as a ‘kick’ to pull themselves back into the real world.  I’m not sure if Christopher Nolan used the combination of Cotillard and Edith Piaf’s iconic song as a poetic move to echo her other film “La Vie En Rose” where she portrays Piaf, but it is brilliant.  So this week I watched “La Vie En Rose” and cried like a baby.

I also just noticed that the name of Cotillard’s character in “INCEPTION” is Mal, and she represents the tortured side of Dicaprio’s mind.  In Piaf’s song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” one of the lines is “ni le mal“ (“not even the bad”) meaning “I regret nothing, not even the bad.”