It’s almost as if we don’t need a biopic of Edith Piaf; her life was a movie already. Born into poverty, she was discovered on the streets of 1930s Paris, singing for her supper, precipitating a remarkable rise to fame and fortune. All that was missing in her life was love, yet her romance with French boxing champion Marcel Cerdan (Jean-Pierre Martins) was to be tragically short-lived. It was both her making and undoing: the pain somehow lent her singing an even greater emotional intensity, at the price of a punishing intake of alcohol and pills. She died in 1963 a mere husk of a woman, old beyond her 47 years.

Dir: Olivier Dahan. 2007. France. 140 mins. Marion Cotillard, Gérard Depardieu, Sylvie Testud, Clotilde Courau. NC16. In French with English subtitles.