Vastly Overrated

Rating: 6/10 (10 October 2011)

Edith Piaf may not have suited everyone's musical tastes but she was a principal singer in her day. This film is the story of her tragic and tempestuous life. It won the Oscar for Marion Cotillard, who portrayed her, only the second time I'm told that an actress has taken away the golden statuette for a performance in a language other than English. Sophia Loren was the first. Although I was enthralled by Cotillard as the love interest in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," I think the Oscar in La Vein en Rose should have gone to Cotillard's makeup artist, who succeeded in preparing Cotillard for the various stages in Piaf's self-destructive and ultimately tragic degeneration.
Although it's not especially difficult to follow, the time sequences in the film jump backward and forward, not necessarily to the advantage of the narrative. One wishes that we'd been given more of Piaf's singing and a little less perhaps of the coterie who surround her and lived off her success. Her famous love affair with the boxer, Marcel Dardan, is presented straight-forwardly but I must say that it failed to move me.
Finally, at nearly 2 -1/2 hours, the film is far longer than it should have been. The mawkish last moment's of Piaf's life should have been left largely on the cutting room floor.