“You’re playing with your life.”
“So? You’ve got to play with something.”

I remember seeing the trailer for this, seems like ages ago now, before anyone was really talking about it much at all, and I was really excited despite, I realise even more now having seen it, not really being such a huge fan of Edith Piaf, and not really knowing all that much about her life. And though I’d seen Marion Cotillard in a lot of stuff, like Innocence and more recently A Good Year, she’d never struck me either as a particularly outstanding actress nor, as here, as knock-out beautiful as she is.

It’s a beautiful film that kind of closes in on the sorrow in Piaf’s life, cutting in between her close to death and at two stages of her childhood (played by two absolutely wonderful girls both rightly given more screentime than I expected), with her in her prime scattered in between. At the end, an interviewer asks her about each phase we’ve seen: “What advice would you give a woman/a young girl/a child?” to which her every answer is “Love.” The structure first strikes one as jumpy, but the more I think about it now, the more phenomenally coherent I find it. To someone who knew so little about, basically, “what was she so sad about?”, the delivery of information is perfect.

Marion Cotillard is as perfect as “they” say. I really didn’t expect it, and much as I’ll love it if Julie Christie gets the Oscar, Cotillard’s performance is simply so much more. It’s in the later scenes of Piaf’s life that my heart simply drops out of my chest at how much Cotillard vanishes in the role. The make-up, of course, helps; but it’s a two-way effort of make-up, Cotillard working with it as much as it works with her. It’s truly astonishing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 6:10 pm in 5 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as biography, cuties, French, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.