It may comfort some filmgoers to realize that a French film biography of one of that nation's most famous entertainers closely resembles countless American biopics of the same kind. According to Hollywood (and apparently France) either the trajectory of a career follows some predetermined course, or the character and circumstances of great performers inevitably lead to disaster. In the case of this particular genre, whether art imitates life, life imitates art, or art imitates art remains an open and endlessly fascinating question.

The protagonist of such stories struggles to emerge from humble or desperate circumstances - illness, disability, a terrible childhood, etc. - then through talent, grit, and luck, attains success. Great gifts and rewards, as countless legends instruct us, carry with them their own punishment, which means that after a succession of triumphs, the performer succumbs to the blandishments of sycophants and parasites, the temporary pleasures of sex, drugs, and alcohol, the sheer arrogance of fame, and ultimately betrays friends, family, and fans.

In general, that pattern describes the career of Edith Piaf, the waif who became the most celebrated French singer of the 20th century. Over the course of two and a half hours of song and suffering, the movie shows in considerable detail a life more squalid and more colorful than most. The child of an alcoholic, delusional mother and a father who performed in a small-time circus, she was raised in a brothel by whores more kind and loving than her own family, then snatched away by her father to assist in his pathetic act.

The movie shows her as a child singing on the streets, then as a young woman graduating to slightly finer boulevards in Paris, where, played by Marion Cotillard, she makes enough to eat, drink, and pay the rent, but forks over most of her francs to a pimp. Discovered by a nightclub owner and impresario, Louis Leplée (the inevitable Gérard Depardieu), she begins to enjoy the success that will transform her from street singer to the toast of Paris, to international star and national icon.

Aside from its depiction in painstaking detail of the singer's early years, the picture jumps back and forth in time to show the various stages of her career and the many elements that contributed to the creation and eventual destruction of her talent. Her horrible condition in her later years - a broken, drug-raddled, despairing woman, old before her time - serves as the basis for those many flashbacks, the sad memories of a complicated life. The picture returns several times to her on-stage collapses, most of them apparently the result of drug addiction.

Her numerous love affairs, most of them ending badly, apparently fed the palpable melancholy, the heartbreak and suffering that imbued her songs and made her so appealing a figure. Her remarkable voice, her presence, and her history created a powerful bond with her audiences, a relationship that transcended national borders. The movie also spends some time on the great tragic romance of her life, her relationship with the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, which ended in his death in an airplane crash.

Despite its occasionally painful detail, the film entirely ignores the years of the German occupation, the most important event in modern French history, when in Marcel Ophuls' words, a whole nation collaborated with its conquerors; it thus also neglects her performances for German troops in France, Berlin, and Austria. Like most of her colleagues in the arts, she apparently never missed a beat, her career never stumbled, and her reputation as a quintessentially French artist never suffered.

Aside from the pathos of her life and of course the remarkable singing - the real Piaf's voice, by the way, provides the best part of the movie - the singer seems a most unattractive person. Even in her youth she frequently behaves like a loud, rude, capricious drunk, insulting her friends, rejecting her mentors, betraying the people who love her, consistently self-destructive from beginning to end. Beyond detailing much of the life itself, "La Vie en Rose" offers little in the way of analysis of its subject's search for oblivion. The painful life produced the wonderful songs, but also inspired an often painful motion picture, no life of roses.

"La Vie en Rose" (PG-13), directed by Olivier Dahan, is now playing at Little Theatres and Pittsford Cinemas.