Edith Piaf, the great French chanteuse, was Europe's equivalent to America's Billie Holiday. They were both famously tragic icons who told the story of their often unlucky and difficult lives directly through their art.
Now French director Olivier Dahan has made a colourfully melodramatic biopic of Piaf's career that has a poignant and superbly lifelike central performance from Marion Cottilard, miming to the singer's voice.
The daughter of a circus performer, who worked for years in a brothel before being discovered by cabaret owner Leplee (Gerard Depardieu), Piaf had affairs with Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour and had a particularly tragic romance with champion boxer Marcel Cerdan. She died of drink and drug abuse not long after singing her signature song Non, Je Ne Negrette Rien.
The film goes backwards and forwards in time, sometimes confusingly, from her adolescence and youth in a rundown area of Paris to her final years when she regularly collapsed on stage.
It isn't always easy to follow. And the affairs are done in such a way that only Jean-Pierre Martins as Cerdan seems like real flesh and blood.
But, despite the film's faults and omissions (there is nothing about her controversial actions during the German Occupation, for instance), there were a good many members of the audience with tears in their eyes by the end. That is substantially down to Cotillard and the voice of Piaf.
La Vie En Rose was showing at the Berlin Film Festival
La Vie En Rose
