No better time than Christmas to come over all sentimental. We do like a good weep in the festive season and this year the Film Society will need  the Kleenex. The life story of Edith Piaf has it all: epic, heart-tugging music, the little woman battling against the odds, the sharks who lived off her, the soaring talent.

La Vie en Rose traces Piaf’s life story from being brought up in a brothel, singing on the street, to international stardom and the fall into misery and addiction. There’s her passionate love for Marcel Cerdan, a boxer, but this too cannot last: he is killed in a plane crash on the way to see her perform in New York.

Everything in Piaf’s life seems to flicker and last only a short time. Director Olivier Dahan takes up this episodic, flitting quality by breaking the film into a series of scenes moving back and forth in time, reflections by Piaf on the passing moments. There’s the time she drove her husband into an Arizona cactus – who wouldn’t? – and the wild parties, growing up with her friend Titine, the hugely successful concerts, the poolside Martinis.

It’s a compelling tale, with sad parallels in the tragic life of Judy Garland. We like our divas to be courageous, but somehow we like them fragile too. Marion Cotillard holds La Vie en Rose together with a tremendous performance that rightly won her an Oscar – the first ever for a performance in French. Fans might remember her in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, though we’ll gloss over that little box office disaster.

The film ends, inevitably, with Je Ne Regrette Rien, and it’s still powerful stuff. But for me, La Vie en Rose should be Piaf’s anthem: all the longing, the sweetness and the melancholy rolled into that too knowing self-delusion. Dead at 47, Piaf is still very much with us emotionally. Get along and shed a tear.

Janis Bright

La Vie en Rose shows at Scarborough Library on 19 December, 7.30pm