In Full Bloom

EDITH PIAF'S COMING-OF-AGE

Marion Cotillard's portrayal of revered French chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, out next month from Picturehouse, gathers up the shards of the singer's fractured life and turns them into an emotional prism. The 31-year-old actress, who won a Cesar for her work in A Very Long Engagement, is best known in the States for decorating two blithe tales of male self-actualization, Big Fish and A Good Year. But there's nothing ornamental about her Piaf. She plays her variously as a scrappy gamine, a middle-aged diva, and the withered old woman she had become by the time of her death, at only 47, in 1963.

At almost five feet seven, Cotillard is nearly a foot taller than "the Little Sparrow," but her performance is more than an act of compression. She has perfected Piaf's coat-hanger posture, shuffling gait, and toothy grin. And she elicits empathy as she makes the turbulent journey of a sickly, brothel-raised waif who by the age of 25 had been both accused of murdering her mentor, Louis Leplee (played by Gerard Depardieu), and consecrated as an icon on the Champs-Elysees.

Director Olivier Dahan channels Brassai' in his depiction of the 1930s Paris demimonde, and he juxtaposes Piaf's triumphs with her tragedies, her drolleries with her tempests, constantly probing her ability to endure abandonment by everyone she loves. She survives only as long as she can play out her psychodrama with that great throbbing voice. Cotillard lip-synchs Piaf's recordings of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien," "Milord," and the title song, among others, but it's her electric presence that conducts their thunder and lightning.

GRAHAM FULLER