“Aline”: movie review

Strange at first strange, then slightly funny, and finally a kind of francophone musical success story. Alini This is an explanation of neither one nor the other. As the original block of text explains, it is “inspired” by the life of Celine Dion, selling records to Gazelle Quebec, perhaps best known for her compositions. Titanic, “Jamie’s heart is still beating.” But it is also a “work of art” in which the main character is not Celine Dion, but Aline Die, co-director of the film Valerie Lemercier.

Non-Céline Aline is a creature of sound in every sense of the word (Victoria Sio plays her voice, synced by Lemercier Lip), highlighting melodies known to the real Dion, though none of the few Dion actually wrote. So Dion is terribly everywhere and nowhere, at the same time, her name, except the opening text, is cut from the film, except when we see the title of Aline’s first album, blatantly duplicated. Dion’s voice (The actual record was called the voice of die). Instead of a tribute band, it’s all a big biographical tribute.

This is just the beginning of the movie’s many features. By the way, you can list why Lemercier chooses, in addition to purely commercial reasons, to make a film about the life of Celine Dion, since the singer has a pretty boring life by musical biographical standards.

It is true that he was born into a family of 14 children, something unusual in 1960s Catholic Quebec. The strangest historical fact we know about Dionysian, as evidenced by autobiographical accounts, is that he fell in love with his manager René Angelili when he was a teenager, he being 26 years older and already married. They divorced after divorce, had three children shortly after IVF, and lived happily ever after, with their hard work, sold-out shows, and Las Vegas residencies before dying a natural death in 2016. – The Story of Drugs and Drug Abuse rock ‘n roll.

The film’s most outrageous creative choice, at one point, is Lemercie’s beautiful but admittedly lackluster digital face transplant into a child’s body to play Alice as a child. This only lasts for the first 15-20 minutes of the film and still leaves an indelible and unusually disturbing impression, for example when Alini, as a small but sunken nasolabial groove, and an adult Lemercier with a large nose, arrive. the climb. His brothers interpreters on the edge of the stage. Or later, when he was about eight years old and brought to his wedding “Mamy Blue” by French composer Huber Giro, he surprised the whole family, especially his mother Silveta (Daniel Fisho), his father Anglomar (Rock Lafortun) and a . Many older brothers named Jean-Algo (Antoine Vezina).

The latter finds a way to get Aline to sing with renowned Montreal music director Guy-Claude Camar (Sylvain Marcel), Angel’s movie booth. The rest is more or less well-known musical history, with some romantic arrangements and montages, typical pop songs of the time. (The soundtrack is very well chosen, starting with old French songs, with a thematic angle to match the mood of the story, plus another French-Canadian diva, Rufus Wainwright, singing the chorus “Going to a Town” with “Tired of America” in the last scene.)

God, or should we say Dieu, only knows what the real Dion is doing with all this. But he leaves smelling like roses and looking like a billion Canadian dollars, embodied by the friendly Lemercier, with a smile in his teeth and warm feet until next year.

The star’s chemistry with Marcel softens the horror of their age difference, or at least almost, and there’s a lot of wholesome charm in the scenes with Dad and Dad and the never-ending group of brothers, as funny and entertaining as the film. . Corgi. This is a very forgiving, if somewhat interminable, hour, and quite lacking in proper drama. But maybe that’s what Dion’s hardened fan audience wants to see.