This French film has been nominated in several categories at each of the three major international awards shows this year, but the hype isn't entirely warranted.

UPDATE: (Feb. 24) -- The film's 2008 awards are listed at the end of the article.

Although this film about the life of chanteuse Edith Piaf has gotten plenty of global recognition of late, especially for lead actress Marion Cotillard's performance, the sad fact is that the film overall does not rise to the level of Cotillard's brilliant portrayal.

Among genres, biopics have a strange tendency to elicit amazing performances amid lackluster or otherwise uneven filmmaking (Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the titular character in Capote, to name only two recent examples).

Like the similarly disappointing Capote, La Vie en Rose subsumes the undeniable tour de force performance of its lead into a tepid, badly paced and overall washed-out movie that, at the end, will leave the viewer asking one admittedly churlish question: So what?

Performances

Cotillard, as has already been pointed out incessantly, is more than equal to the challenge of this career-defining role. Her performance is emotional and nuanced in a role that requires her to portray Piaf at various stages of her life, from feisty teen to embittered legend.

Cotillard's expressive face and especially her sense of movement, of knowing exactly what her body is doing at every moment and what that movement is expressing, is the quintessence of fine acting.

Of the film's other performances, the standouts are Gerard Depardieu as Louis Leplée, the avuncular impresario who is later killed by Piaf's mob associates; Emmanuelle Seigner as Titine, young Piaf's hooker-with-a-gold-heart protector; and Pascal Greggory as the driving taskmaster who is nevertheless the first to recognize that Piaf's talent can be shaped for the mainstream.

Direction

Director Oliver Dahan, heretofore best known for La Vie Promise (about a prostitute whose illegitimate daughter stabs her pimp, it also stars Pascal Greggory), has said elsewhere that he was trying to make not a biopic but an impressionistic portrait of Piaf.

This is an ambitious goal that, had it been met, would have made for quite an interesting experience. Unfortunately, Dahan succeeds in making only a biopic, with some of the problems that seem to be inherent in the genre; namely, the temptation to beat the audience about the head with the subject's wondrousness.

“Wasn't she marvelous?” Dahan seems to be asking the audience at every turn. “Wasn't her life melodramatic?”

As the audience, we don't want to be told this — we want to be shown. There is far too much emphasis on Piaf's early life, which was admittedly the stuff of drama, a combination of The Threepenny Opera and My Fair Lady.

Yet, the drama of her life — complete with a drunken mother who abandoned her, a father who thought it would be a good idea to leave her in the care of the proprietor of a whorehouse and who later returned to fetch her so that she could work in his street-vaudeville act — for reasons that are baffling, does not translate on the screen.

The muddy cinematography, the narrative omissions on certain points and the strange pacing, which keeps us immersed in her street life yet leapfrogs over her romantic life (and what is a legendary torch singer without her romantic chagrin?), seem to be three reasons.

Narrative

As Piaf tells her handlers later in life, “I've heard 'no' my whole life, and I won't accept that anymore as answer!” This is clearly meant to be the payoff for the lengthy childhood scenes; that is, it's meant to be one of the culminating points in a clearly defined narrative.

In this sense, of course, Dahan is cheating his “portrait,” and the movie would have been better served had he simply opted to create a (yes, perhaps not original cinema but necessary!) dramatic arc, even if that arc struck him as banal. Because, at the end of the day, there is a dramatic narrative—it's just annoyingly incomplete.

We are treated to a vague and nearly inexplicable view of her relationship with the boxer and love of her life, Marcel Cerdan (interpreted with pretty-face, hard-body, nothing-else élan by Jean-Pierre Martins).

To create a portrait of this affair, Dahan would have needed to show us the small moments, the subtle intimacies, that went into creating this grand passion — instead, we get the scene-chewing that is Piaf's breakdown when she discovers her lover has died in a plane crash, without the foundation that would have given the scene its true poignancy.

Nominations

Not surprisingly, for a French-made film about a French national treasure, the movie has swept the César nominations with 11 in total, including Best Film, Best Director (Olivier Dahan), Best Supporting Actor (Pascal Greggory), Best Supporting Actress (Sylvie Testud), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Best Editing.

The film has also been nominated for the following awards in the following categories:

• Best Actress (Marion Cotillard): Oscar, BAFTA, Cesar
• Best Costume Design: Oscar, BAFTA, Cesar
• Best Makeup: Oscar, BAFTA
• Best Sound: BAFTA, Cesar
• Best Production Design: BAFTA, Cesar
• Best Music: BAFTA
• Best Foreign Film: BAFTA

The costume design, which encompasses everything from street-urchin wear to glamorous chanteuse frocks, is quite wonderful, and the movie will probably walk away with one if not all of the costume design awards. And undoubtedly, Marion Cotillard also deserves the Best Actress awards.

2008 Awards Won

BAFTA (Announced Feb. 10)

• Best Actress, Marion Cotillard
• Best Makeup
• Best Music
• Best Costume Design

César (Announced Feb. 22)

• Best Actress (Meilleure Actrice), Marion Cotillard
• Best Costume Design (Meilleurs Costumes)
• Best Production Design (Meilleurs Décors)
• Best Cinematography (Meilleure Photographie)
• Best Sound (Meilleur Son)

Oscar (Announced Feb. 24)

• Best Actress, Marion Cotillard
• Best Makeup

For more on Marion Cotillard, see:

• Best Actress, Marion Cotillard