Olivier Dahan directs this fair film made watchable thanks to Marion Cotillard's fine (and Academy Award winning) performance as the chantress with demons, Edit Piaf. The film traces Edith's life from her grimy childhood as the daughter of an acrobat, to her worldwide success, to her sad, lonely death at a very young forty-nine. Dahan uses a nonlinear approach cartwheeling between the young Edith living in her mother's bordello to her bedridden, morphine riddled older self. A technique which I found bothersome/annoying (take your pick). La Vie en Rose, however, is ripe with the gorgeous, unmistakable music of Piaf (Dahan correctly used Piaf's original recordings in the film) and does show us a woman who never really escaped her upbringing, or sadly, the tragedy of her love affair with boxer, Marcel Cerdan. Sadly too, the film glosses over Piaf time in Paris under the Nazi occupation during World War II - a time that truly made her famous, which left this reviewer wondering what she was hiding.
My rating 7 out of 10.
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