"GRAB them with all you've got, " cabaret owner Louis Leplee advised Edith Piaf, whom he spotted singing on the streets of Pigalle. "Live the song." She didn't need any telling.

Singers too often exude feelings that are not their own. Piaf knew almost nothing but tragedy. Anyone she ever loved she lost. Her only relief was in song. Her voice was her life. Clear as a bell and with a passionate intensity that made her tiny birdlike frame quiver with anguish, her singing captivated the world in a succession of show-stopping numbers, typified by 'Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien' which was her epitaph when . . . arthritic and morphine-addicted . . . she died in 1962 aged 47. "No, no regrets, " she sang. "I've forgotten the past. I will have no regrets."

While Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon convincingly simulated the voices of Johnny Cash and June Carter in I Walk The Line, it would have been absurd to portray Piaf in La Vie En Rose without drawing on her own heart-wrenching voice and director Olivier Dahan doesn't try . . .

even though actress Marion Cotillard is an accomplished singer.

Anything else would have sounded false and schmaltzy. So Cotillard . . .

best known up to now for Luc Besson's Taximovies and as Russell Crowe's love interest in A Good Year . . . mimes and lip-synchs Piaf 's recordings, making them flesh with a performance of mesmeric immediacy. She becomes one with Piaf at every age after a horrific Dickensian childhood, abandoned by her mother while her father was away in the trenches, and brought up in her grandmother's brothel in Normandy.

Dahan opts for a non-linear narrative, opening in New York in 1959 with Piaf collapsing on the stage at the Carnegie Hall. He uses an awareness of what she became to give heightened poignancy to what her life had been. Time-leaps take us back to brief moments of happiness, as when a deluded girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) in the brothel imagines she's her daughter and, later, when her father returns from the war and takes her away to a circus, where he works as an acrobat.

Every time there is a glimmer of hope, it is dashed. Even her first mentor, Leplee, played by Gerard Depardieu, is taken from her, murdered just when her career seemed set to take off. When she finally finds love with the charismatic world-champion boxer, Moroccan-born Marcel Cerdan (Jeanne-Pierre Martins), his death in a plane crash destroys her.

La Vie En Rose is an emotional rollercoaster ride, just as Piaf 's life was. Dahan imbues it will all the melodramatic power and verve of a Hollywood biopic, evoking a sense of Piaf as a Gallic Judy Garland.

While there are some elegiac vignettes . . . a ravaged Piaf sitting at the water's edge on a beach in California, giving an interview, and Caroline Sihol as Marlene Dietrich coming up to her at a restaurant to express her admiration . . . he leaves out much that might perhaps be confusing to American audiences, in particular Piaf 's role in the resistance in Paris during the German occupation when she used Jewish accompanists to protect them.

La Vie En Rose has opened strongly in the US. Don't be surprised if it shows the legs to figure in next year's Oscar nominations, with perhaps a thoroughly deserved Oscar nod for Cotillard.