Reviews

Céline Dion Quasi-Biopic Aline Must Be Seen to Be Believed

Valérie Lemercier, playing a character based on Dion from childhood to the present day, fêtes the French-Canadian diva all by herself.
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By Jean-Marie Leroy/Rectangle Productions.

Perhaps the French were less surprised by Aline, a film based on the life of Céline Dion that premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday. They are more likely to be familiar with the work of Valérie Lemercier, the writer-director-actor-singer who made and stars in Aline. Lemercier is, I’ve learned, known for work in which she transforms—sometimes into children, other times, well, going a different direction. But to an unaccustomed American, what Lemercier does in Aline is an utter shock, one of the strangest approaches to a biopic I’ve yet seen.

Here’s what happens in Aline: Lemercier, who is 57, plays a character based on Dion at all ages of her life. Meaning, the barely post-toddler Aline—who, like Dion, is from a Quebecois family with 14 children—is played by Lemercier. The 12-year-old, too. And the teenager, the twentysomething, and beyond. There is some VFX work at play, and certainly some makeup and lighting tricks, but they don’t do terribly much to cover up what is happening. Aline is an otherwise straightforward behind-the-music narrative in which an actor who is almost 60 plays a small child. 

The uncanny effect of this lasts nearly throughout the whole movie, the sight of a digitally shrunk Lemercier wobbling around as a young singer on the rise lingering long after Aline has grown into adulthood. Lemercier apes the tics and mannerisms of a child in a way that might play okay on stage, but in the close-up of film is almost menacing. There is a chance that much more of Aline is played for comedy than I realize; perhaps the jolts of revulsion and fascination are meant to resolve into a giddy laugh. But the film doesn’t really wink to let us in on the joke, except perhaps for one scene that puts a full, slo-mo view on the results of this experiment.

However it’s meant to be interpreted, Aline’s casting choice is at the center of what is a fairly compelling music biopic—praise I don’t use lightly, as that genre is perhaps my least favorite in all of cinema. Films like this tend to be programmatic and plodding, hitting obvious beats while giving us the songs we know, love, and could just as easily listen to at home.

Aline does a lot of the expected timelining, but Lemercier stages it with a zippier patter than many other films. She invitingly highlights the humor and quirk of Dion’s upbringing and early career trajectory. In that way, Lemercier’s performance is a peculiar asset; she helps materialize and deepen the film’s portrait of a precocious kid so eager to be a grownup star. 

Aline does offer up some musical numbers, sung by Victoria Sio, which are meant to remind us of Dion’s signature, cathedral-high belt. They mostly made me want to listen to the real thing. The music isn’t really the focus, or main care, of the film, anyway. Aline is much more interested in the inner workings of Dion, her family life and her long relationship with her Svengali, René Angélil. (He’s called Guy-Claude in the film.)

Aline is, at its best, an engrossing, curious character study. Dion’s devotion to her family—these demanding, intrusive, fiercely loyal nags—will be familiar to anyone who’s ever met, say, an Italian-American clan from Long Island. The film vividly illustrates the dichotomy of a very famous person whose private sphere is very small. (There is no indication that Dion has any friends who aren’t also her employees, for example.) 

The René of it all—he was 38 when he first met a 12-year-old Dion, and would marry her 13 years later—is handled with only semi-cautious affection. Time is spent registering the family’s resistance to the relationship, particularly from Aline’s mother, played with tenacious bustle by Danielle Fichaud. But the story must eventually give way to acceptance, and I can’t quite tell if, in this instance, Lemercier’s casting is a copout. Surely it would be more startling to see an actual teenager first crushing on her manager twice her age. When it’s Lemercier in the role, the disparity is only theoretical, imagined. Lemercier is perhaps too reluctant to confront the actual reality, which would sully her narrative’s grand, warmhearted sense of inevitability. 

Aline falters as it nears its conclusion, hurrying through major life developments because it’s time to wrap up. For as large as Guy-Claude looms over the film, his death is handled awfully perfunctorily. I also wanted some of the granular industry stuff, like details about the Las Vegas contract and other ventures that have made Dion nearly a billionaire. (By some estimates.) But, again, Lemercier is much more concerned with interiority and domestic matters than anything so cold and technical. 

For the most part, that impulse serves Aline well. The film accesses what lies at the heart of Dion as a public figure: she’s a bit of a weirdo, goofy and corny and gaudy and fabulous. By the end of Aline, we’ve gained a keen sense of how an intensely family-oriented, Streisand-obsessed kid with a crush on her mentor might have processed those influences to emerge as the dorky-glorious diva we know and love today. Aline, for all its eccentricity, is persuasive psychological speculation. We don’t need the over-egged song at the end laying out the film’s thesis statement in such literal terms. Lemercier has already provided us with the necessary evidence; and she’s been right there with us, for better or worse, the whole time.

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