Of all the acting Oscars® ever given, few have been more richly deserved than the statuette Marion Cotillard picked up for her performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en rose, the 2007 biopic about Edith Piaf, the twentieth century's most celebrated French chanteuse. Cotillard gives a pitch-perfect portrayal of the "Little Sparrow" at almost every stage of life, from her spunky adolescent years to her premature decline and untimely death, which struck when she wasn't yet fifty but looked a good two decades older. This is impressive by any measure, and it's all the more amazing when you look at Stepping into Character, a short film about the movie's cosmetic effects included on Picturehouse's DVD edition. Not only is Cotillard a real-life beauty in her early thirties, ideally suited to play Piaf as a vivacious youth, but in her old-lady makeup she still looks uncannily like Piaf, now ravaged by addictions and debilitated by disease. By flawlessly pulling off transformations like these, Cotillard outdoes all competitors in recent memory; even Charlize Theron in Monster didn't have to adopt a steady stream of different appearances throughout the picture. Nor is this a matter of makeup magic alone. Like all outstanding biopic stars, Cotillard meets the double challenge of accurately impersonating her subject and simultaneously conveying her psychological depths. The result is a performance so persuasive and moving that Piaf – never afraid to expose her innermost self for the sake of emotionally truthful art – would surely have applauded it.

Piaf's life seems ideal biopic material. She was born into poverty, abandoned by her parents, and raised in a brothel run by her grandmother. Although many details of her life are clouded by legend, the film accepts the story that she was blind for several years as a child, but was cured when her prostitute friends took her to the shrine of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, to whom Piaf went on praying for the rest of her life. As a teenager she supported herself by singing in the streets under her real name, Édith Gassion, and at seventeen she had a child who died two years later. At twenty she was spotted by Louis Leplée, a nightclub impresario who hired her to sing and dreamed up the famous nickname – Le Môme Piaf, a slang term meaning Little Sparrow – that reflected her flighty personality and diminutive stature. Leplée was murdered the following year by criminals Piaf knew, but she survived the scandal and rose to international stardom. In later years she acquired famous friends like Jean Cocteau and Yves Montand, fell passionately in love with a world-champion boxer who died in a plane crash, almost lost her own life in multiple car accidents, and developed chronic alcohol and morphine habits. Her mind started to fail in 1963, and later that year she died of liver cancer. She was forty-seven.

To sum it up, Piaf had a hugely dramatic life. And this could have been a problem for the makers of La Vie en rose, since the ingredients of that life read like a laundry list of biopic clichés: rotten childhood, good-hearted hookers, gangster friends, celebrity friends, deaths and drugs, triumphs and tragedies, you name it. But the screenwriters – Olivier Dahan, who directed the picture, and newcomer Isabelle Sobelman – have kept things fresh by artfully scrambling the story's chronology, thus increasing its qualities of surprise and suspense. This strategy begins in the opening scene, when we see Piaf singing to an audience just after we've watched people summoning an ambulance because, as we see later still, she's collapsed onstage. The device persists throughout the film, which leaps across time and space as effortlessly as Piaf croons her favorite songs; it's a tad confusing at first, but it pays large dividends by dividing events along thematic lines instead of following the straight-line trajectory of ordinary movies. Even if you're already familiar with Piaf's history, you can expect the unexpected here.

Dahan's directing is equally creative, with a strong assist from Tetsuo Nagata's vigorous cinematography. I could cite many examples, but a particularly good one is the scene where Piaf learns that her beloved boxer has perished in a plane crash; even before she hears the news, the camera follows her about with a strangely off-kilter fluidity that gives the moment a surrealistic touch, making us know something is wrong before we're actually told. Flourishes like this are another solid firewall against any stale or worn-out plot material that might otherwise have weakened the film.

Anyone who makes a musical biopic faces a big decision about how to handle the performance scenes – the usual choice is either to dub in sounds from the actual musician's recordings or create new performances that do their best to imitate the originals. Apart from a few numbers unavailable in top-quality Piaf recordings, Dahan wisely takes the first option, recognizing that Piaf's one-of-a-kind voice is the best possible gateway to an understanding of her mind and heart, and would be impossible to duplicate anyway. This makes Piaf the most illustrious member of the supporting cast, but the others are excellent in their own ways. Among them are the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu as Piaf's first patron, Emmanuelle Seigner as a prostitute who cares for her, Sylvie Testud as her youthful friend and drinking companion, Pascal Greggory as her manager, and Jean-Pierre Martins as the ill-fated prizefighter.

And then there are the songs, which deserve costar billing at the very least – the marvelous title number, the stirring "Non, je ne regrette rien," the lighter "Mon manège à moi," and plenty of others. I've often been struck by the remarkably high number of first-rate music biopics there are, from high-toned entries like Mahler and Amadeus to jazzy fare like The Glenn Miller Story and Bird to rock'n'roll pictures as different as The Buddy Holly Story and American Hot Wax and What's Love Got to Do with It. Acted, written, and directed with hardly a false note, La Vie en rose, called La Môme in its native France, ranks with the very best. Piaf couldn't have asked for a better memorial.

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by David Sterritt