A tale not told through rose coloured glasses

Rating: 7/10 (11 May 2020)

If you thought the life of Judy Garland was tragic, the life of French singer Edith Piaf is 10 times sadder.
Surprisingly, given she's such a legend, this movie does not romanticise Piaf at all, but in being so tough, it is hard to sympathise with her.
Marion Cotillard really does throw everything at the role, but the movie didn't move me hugely.
In some ways, Piaf's life is too nasty and sad to portray. Born into poverty, raised in her grandmother's brothel and then travelling with her acrobat father as a teenager, Piaf sings for her supper on Paris streets, gets involved with gangsters and murder and somehow finds fame as a singer.
But her dependence on alcohol and pills send her health spiralling until she's an old woman, washed up, at age 45.
Most of the time, Piaf is a tough broad, and the only time her outlook aligns with the title of the movie, as in 'seeing life through rose coloured glasses' is when she's infatuated with a married French boxer.
Two key events the film ignores is Piaf giving birth at 17 to a girl who she neglected and who died at age two. Also her alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupiers of Paris during World War II.
But generally, the director goes for an ultra realistic style of storytelling. The costumes and sets are immaculate. The cinematography gets right up close to the participants of the parties and the concerts - sometimes dizzyingly so.
The most moving scenes are as Edith as a child, sweetly praying to St Therese to help her.
Cotillard players Edith as an impulsive, brittle, childlike figure, who gets swept along with whatever's in front of her and who has few coping skills and not much charm - given she's in showbiz.
The scenes when she dates the boxer are brilliantly done - Piaf allows herself to fall for him, and be happy, in one of the few instances where she lets her guard down.
It explains why she's so devastated when he dies in the plane crash.
I guess it's a miracle that Edith survived as long as she did, and was so famous for so long, but fame did her no favours and she belongs to the long canon of artists who lived fast and died young.