Marion Cotillard's full-out, go-for-broke performance as fabled French singer Edith Piaf is the white-hot center of writer-director Olivier Dahan's biopic, which chronicles her life from impoverished post-WWI childhood to her death in 1963, internationally famous but ravaged by years of illness, drug abuse and constant work.
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The film opens in 1959, as a frail Piaf collapses while performing at a swanky New York City venue, then flashes back to 1918, where a ragged, 3-year-old Edith Gassion (Manon Chevallier) cries on a filthy stoop as her mother, Anetta (Clotilde Courau), sings on the streets of Paris' poor Belleville district. Anetta eventually sends her...
Released:
2005
Rated:
PG-13
Length:
140 mins