Raised in her flinty grandma’s brothel after her alcoholic parents abandoned her, the girl went blind, regaining her sight after five years when the prostitutes prayed for her at a religious shrine. She spent her teenage years singing for change on street corners and drinking away the proceeds in lowlife bars. Her remarkable voice caught the ear of a nightclub impresario who put her onstage, and like her contemporaries Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, her emotional instability and drug abuse grew with her fame. Add in turbulent love affairs, murder, international stardom, glamour, auto accidents, a plane crash, frequent health crises and a dead child and you’ve got yourself a movie. (Dahan doesn’t even delve into Piaf’s heroic work with the French resistance in World War II.)

 

Marion Cotillard plays the troubled singer from her teens to her death in a performance that can only be called transcendent. Cotillard grasps the insecurity that plagued Piaf from her loveless childhood, and the all-consuming egotism that came with her concert and recording success. She may be a shambles offstage, but asserting herself in the spotlight, her raspy voice soaring to the rafters, she transmutes her pain into glory. Cotillard, a tall, striking actress, seems to have physically shrunk to play the tiny, homely Piaf. She lip-synchs Piaf’s anthems impeccably, and when Dahan presents her concert debut in pure, thrilling silence, she makes that daring choice work, as well. Her riveting performance, distinctive gestures and defiantly wounded body language without ever descending into mere impersonation. It’s sometimes wrenching to watch, but it’s too gripping to turn away from.

 

Dahan avoids a straight chronological approach to the complex story, organizing incidents for maximum dramatic impact, and staging some events with unabashed artifice. After one crisis, the emotionally devastated singer wanders her cavernous luxury apartment in a daze, the camera drifting with her in a continuous tracking shot, and in a moment of theatrical metaphysics, she walks directly, magically, onstage to pour out her heart. Dahan and Cotillard have created an amazing biopic of an extraordinary voice attached to a fragile and fallible woman.

 

The movie, the voice of Piaf, and a performance that turns Cotillard into a great new star shimmer with the kind of beauty, power, intensity and visual opulence you want to experience again and again.