She is nobody's child

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2008)

Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee Marion Cotillard was absolutely brilliant in this performance. I have never seen anyone who had such range in character.
As to the story itself, it was brilliant, also. If this has been today, we would be watching the story of Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse. Piaf was the pop diva of the day in France and lived the life. She was addicted to drugs and alcohol and treated her baby in much the way she was treated by her mother.
It has been said that the film is frantically trying to get all the details of Piaf's life and barely touches many subjects. In a sense that is true.
The movie did not clearly show that she was blind for four years when her father left her in the whorehouse with his mother. The only real mother she had was Titine, the fabulously beautiful Emmanuelle Seigner (The Ninth Gate, Bitter Moon). It was not also clear in the movie how attached she was to her pimp. I am not sure that people realized that she left her first public performance to pay him so she would not get hurt or killed.
Her downfall after the murder of Louis Leplée (Gérard Depardieu) and her rehabilitation by Raymond Asso (Marc Barbé) were dramatic and well done.
Olivier Dahan (The Crimson Rivers II: The Angels of the Apocalypse, The Promised Life) has done a wonderful job in my humble opinion and the performance by Cotillard makes this film worth watching many times.
The rendition of La Marseillaise by the 10-year-old makes this a keeper for me. I have been in love with that song since I first heard it in Casablanca, and give an automatic star to any movie that includes it.