a terrible picture made great by a peerless performance

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2007)

This is one of the best performances you will ever see. For that reason alone go and see this, otherwise, tedious picture. Ms. Cotillard's performance makes you forget about the dreadful photography, gawdawful direction, cheap set design, astonishing continuity mistakes, and many of the phoned-in perfs, including Depardieu's.
Marion Cotillard, with the best make-up job I've seen in a long, long time, takes the audience on a mesmerizing, emotionally draining roller coaster in which you will love, hate, want to scream at, and cry with Marion as Piaf. Ms. Cotillard's performance should be studied by all the wanna-be actors.
As for the rest of the picture... The script is pretty awful melodrama, seemingly written in one quick sitting by writers imbued with an over-abundant faith in their (missing) talent. And then, one of the writers decided to direct this cheesy, cheap, messy, dirty-looking and forgettable picture which, without Ms. Cotillard's performance, would have been an instant dud.