LA VIE EN ROSE. Dir Olivier Dahan. 2007

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Marion Cotillard is outstanding as Edith Piaf in Dahan's biography. Piaf’s classic songs are terrific and passionately delivered, and the film feels like a cinematic roller coaster ride of emotions and fragments from Piaf's life. The effect is of vivid but random memory recall, as though we are seeing moving snapshots taken through her life.

Dahan serves up a visual maelstrom, from Piaf as a small child left with her grandmother to be brought up in a brothel, through her years of success and arrogance, to her death, ravaged by drugs and alcohol. Loss follows loss, first her father takes her away from her mother, then she is torn from the arms of the prostitute she comes to love, and finally she is grief stricken at the death of her lover, boxer Marcel Cerdan. She never recovered from her broken heart, which caused her addiction to morphine, and her physical degeneration is shocking.

Cotillard's Piaf is outspoken and rough, drunk and mouthy, but occasionally vulnerable. The music is fantastic and Cotillard's performance is so riveting it feels as though we are watching Piaf herself. Despite witnessing her behaviour - brash, a bit trashy, sometimes pathetic, her character remains elusive.

Dahan's use of flashbacks flings the viewer from time to time and place to place, forwards and backwards in a breathless and almost bewildering sequence of unrelated events. Nevertheless, the film is gripping throughout, Piaf's progress upward and downward is compelling and, as the film reaches its climax as she sings her heart out, the power and heartfelt performance leaves this audience gaping at the screen in stunned silence.

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