Great Performances, but could have been better

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2007)

Firstly Marion Cotillard was great. She really moved like an old woman in the later scenes, and inhabited the decrepit voice and moves of Piaf. She will be nominated for an Oscar, but probably won't win because of the whole foreign language issue (only a handful of actors have won Oscar for foreign language performances) Having said that, Edith Piaf's life was such a great story and yet somehow the writers managed to botch it up. Events come up out of nowhere. Story lines are started and not followed up on. Stories come out of nowhere at the very end. Basically, every rule of good screen writing is broken, and if you are going to be using a format, as this director did, that is not linear and floats back and forth in time, you need to give your viewers some clues to hold on to.
As I said, spectacular performance by Ms. Cotillard, but the life of Edith Piaf has epic written all over it and that did not come through in this film.