Saturday... Soho was given over to Pride.
Wherever you looked there was pink. Pink wigs, drag, flags, people.
Old Compost Street were awash with couples holding hands - a rarity I know - and Soho Square was surrounded by stalls yearning for the legendary pink pound.

Constant Reader I fled to the dark joys of the cinema.

But in keeping with my idren I did see a film about a tortured female singer with the obligatory gay following - LA VIE EN ROSE, Olivier Dahan's controversial film of Edith Piaf.

The film has provoked a few column inches over Dahan's approach to telling the incident-packed life of France's greatest chanteuse with it's flashbacks and flashforwards as well as certain incidents left out, most notably the odd way the whole of World War II is glossed over. This is strange as she certainly played an interesting part in covert resistance.

However Dahan certainly fits in all the other major incidents in her extraordinary life - born in poverty during WWI, brought up in her grandmother's brothel then on the road with her acrobat father, singing on the street for money where she is spotted by gay club owner Louis Leplee, her first triumph at his club and her implication in his gangland murder, the love of her life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, tragically killed in a plane crash while flying to see her, her car crash that left her addicted to morphine shots, her triumph in the 1960s at the Olympia and her death in 1963 aged only 47.

Dahan's cross-cutting through her life makes the film sometimes difficult to like as it seems willfully to confuse the viewer. However the film works as a new way of telling a screen biography and of course the film is made entirely watchable by the astonishing performance of Marion Cottilard, a true tour-de-force.

From the cocky, abrasive 20 year old to the shrunken, frazzled-haired rheumatic shell 27 years later, Cotillard delivers a tour-de-force performance. Never playing for the audience's sympathy, she is a compelling actress - as anyone who remembers her chilling avenging prostitute in A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT will attest.

The large cast give good support - Gerard Depardieu brings great charm and - oh all right - weight to the role of Louis Leplee, his sudden absence leaves the audience as floundering as it does Edith. Sylvie Testud makes the most of the role of Momone, Edith's sponging friend from the gutter and Jean-Pierre Martins is fine as Cerdan - again like Depardieu he is perfectly cast so the audience feels a genuine loss with his death in the plane crash. In the early brothel scenes I was intrigued who the amazing actress was who played Edith's grandmother... she looked so familiar yet I had no idea who it was. So it was genuinely thrilling to see in the end credits that it was Catherine Allegret, daughter of the wonderful Simone Signoret - she is definitely her mother's daughter! It's also a neat piece of casting as her step-father Yves Montand was discovered by Piaf and was indeed her lover for a short while.

The production design, cinematography, costumes and make-up are all top-notch but the film is rendered memorable by Marion Cottilard's astonishing screen presence.