Director: Olivier Dahan, 12A, 140min

Stars: Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud, Gérard Depardieu

Just as Edith Piaf’s life lurched from disaster to doomed love affair and back again, so does this unashamedly melodramatic biopic. You thought Ray Charles and Johnny Cash had it tough? The early life of France’s Little Sparrow makes them look like trust-fund socialites.

BACKGROUND

• La Vie En Rose

• La Vie En Rose - Sunday Times review

BACKGROUND

• Poor chick: the life of Piaf

• Edith Piaf

• Playing Piaf is risky for a rising star

Piaf, the woman behind the icon

French chanteuse Edith Piaf packed a lot of drama into her short life – a new biopic reveals the woman behind the icon

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Neglected by her mother, an alcoholic singer, little Edith was taken by her father and then promptly abandoned in a brothel. In this twilight world of damaged women, she found a surrogate mother figure, but went blind for several years. After she regained her sight, her father returned to snatch her from the place she called home and take her on the road with a travelling circus.

The first hint of her talent is revealed in a scene that makes your hair stand on end – dying a death as a street performer, the father passes the buck to his daughter. She sings La Marseillaise. The child’s voice is loaded with the kind of pain that only an adult should have to bear. The world stops for a moment. The director Dahan’s vivid, occasionally overwrought, style is at its most successful in moments such as these.

This simple chronological description of Piaf’s early life fails to convey the film’s fragmented, often disorientating, approach. The one constant is Cotillard’s exhaustingly thorough portrayal of Piaf. The physical transformation is extraordinary, but it’s the spirit – perpetually plunging from exaltation to despair – that she captures most effectively. Without the pain, there would be no Piaf.

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