Olivier Dahan’s homage to the woman who famously regretted nothing is absolutely littered with evidence to the contrary. Poor old Edith Piaf. Her short life is served up yet again like a public health warning. She collapses in a heap barely a minute into her first song. The curtain comes down. The screen goes blank, and we are whisked back to a gutter in Paris circa 1918 where the three-year-old waif is more or less dumped by her alcoholic mother.

From this point on, the regrets come thick and fast. Her father deposits her in a brothel for safekeeping before marching off to war. She goes blind for three years. She has a drink problem at 14. She is destroyed by heroin, and crippled by arthritis before 40. She is a ravaged and ancient spectre by October 1963 when cancer finally kills her, aged 47.

The film cashes in on the bleak melodrama as shamelessly as Berlin flogs its stars. The period sets are immaculately stagy, but the shattered storyline fudges an alarming number of loose ends. Marion Cotillard is a vulgar marvel as the stumpy street singer who buries her grievances in her songs. The unnerving voice might belong to Jil Aigrot. But the young actress bristles with charisma.

This is not a role for the fainthearted. Cotillard has to add or drop entire decades as the film rattles unpredictably between the past and her deathbed. The cheeky fresh-faced girl who twists pennies and admiring glances from murky strangers in bars morphs into a tight-faced diva as drugs and delusions of grandeur take a grip of her career. The Edith Piaf who sells out the Paris Olympia in 1960 is an infinitely more brittle bird than the one who beguiled New York a year earlier.

Piaf’s heroic journey is as carefully dressed as the cast. Gérard Depardieu plays an avuncular mentor who plucks the girl off the streets to headline at his nightclub. Sylvie Testud is wonderful as a boozy childhood crony and Artful Dodger. And Jean-Pierre Martins is an understated manly joy as the French boxing champion who became the doomed love of Piaf’s life. The best moment in the film is a nightmarish and clever scene where Piaf is woken by her lover only to discover that he has died in a plane crash. It’s one of the few surreal and magical sequences that work. The Amélie-style photography and picaresque plotting is only fittingly engaging.

Too much of this lavish and expensive picture left me cold. The performances are uniformly admirable, but the drama fails to move. The weird entourage of managers, agents and accordion players who haunt Piaf like pilot fish are deeply unconvincing, and have scant relevance. Yet the death of Piaf’s child barely merits half a scene. Her two marriages hardly figure at all. Ultimately Dahan leans too heavily on the blasts of pure sentiment unleashed by the immortal songs. Despite the best efforts of Cotillard, that is never quite enough.

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