Valerie Lemercier wasn’t all that serious when she pledged during an interview to make her next film about Celine Dion. But the more the French comedian and filmmaker kept thinking about it, the more the pop diva’s life spoke to her.
“I always loved love stories,” she says over videoconference from an all-pink room in her country home in Normandy, France.
Borrowing liberally from Dion’s life, career and marriage to her decades-older manager, Rene Angelil, with just enough creative detours to claim artistic license, Lemercier directs herself in the musical drama “Aline” as Aline Dieu, who goes from the youngest of 14 in a close-knit French Canadian clan to world-famous chanteuse on the Last Vegas strip. Lemercier’s Dieu commands the screen with numbers pulled from the real-life Dion’s songbook, including “Let’s Talk About Love,” “All By Myself” and, yes, “My Heart Will Go On.”
