The movie is the screen biopic of tragic French songstress Edith Piaf, a superstar once raised as a young girl by her grandmother in a Normandy bordello, then discovered on a French street corner.
Marion Cotillard's Oscar win? Totally justified...Many questions remain for those of us unschooled in Piaf lore. I was confused by some of the causes even as I felt the emotional effects, thanks to deep performances.
Compelling but punishing -- an artful ordeal. The best way to process it may be as unintended camp, rolling your eyes in amazement at its litany of misery and heaps of histrionics.
La Vie is a movie so frantic to get to it all that nothing is more than touched on.
Seattle Times
June 27, 2007
This kind of heightened drama might not work in most movies, but it suits its larger-than-life subject: Dahan's La Vie is the movie equivalent of a torch song.
This isn't the first time Piaf's life has been brought to the screen and it probably won't be the last, but Cotillard makes this particular version stand apart.
