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Trailer for "La Vie en Rose"

Early in Olivier Dahan’s biopic about Edith Piaf, the internationally renowned French chanteuse is seated backstage in a theater, head down, looking really bummed out, and bearing an eerie resemblance to the later Judy Garland. It’s probably only an incidental coincidence, but it’s also somehow appropriate.

Garland and Piaf weren’t just contemporaries. Both of them had lives and careers that were tempest-tossed, punctuated by emotional tumult and health crises, threatened and depleted by drug use and cut off early—Garland at 47, Piaf at 48. Both were also acclaimed by fans who reached near-idolatrous levels of devotion.

But if writer-director Dahan’s depiction can be relied on, Garland, for all her emotional and physical instabilities, was a model of equanimity and strength compared to her Gallic counterpart.

Dahan’s sweeping, time-shifting and melodramatically emphatic film is often factually unspecific, but it does make clear that there were substantial reasons for Piaf’s intensely self-dramatizing, destructive behavior and life. He depicts her abandonment by a drug-using mother, her early years in her grandmother’s brothel (actually one of her most stable, wholesome periods) and her young life in the streets as a singer and prostitute, and he has created a richly persuasive mise, an ambiance, of Paris between the wars.

He was evidently less interested in a consistent, coherent narrative. He seems to have been more interested in providing an impression of the star’s personality and career, and he’s had significant success in this, even as his film ignores or obscures facts and events.

And it benefits very greatly from Marion Cotillard’s remarkable, large-scaled performance as Piaf. There are also the songs, more than a score, recorded performances by Piaf that back up Cotillard’s impersonation. For some, these will be worth the admission price.