There’s an episode of “30 Rock” that features the character Jenna Maroney announcing she’s been cast in an unauthorized Janis Joplin biopic, but since the filmmakers don’t have the rights to Joplin’s life, Maroney is playing a Joplin-like character named “Jackie Jormp-Jomp.” But what was a silly gag for the NBC comedy has now become real, in the form of “Aline,” the unauthorized biopic “inspired by” the life of French Canadian singing superstar Celine Dion.
The film follows the life of Aline Dieu, the youngest of 13 children, a child prodigy who takes the world by storm with her powerful voice, falls in love with and marries her much older manager, sings the most famous movie song in the world, and takes up a residency in Vegas, while mothering her three boys, including twins, and reckoning with the mortality of her older husband. It’s the Celine Dion story, with a few names changed, and a couple of snippets of her most famous songs — fairly standard biopic fare.
However, the gimmick of “Aline,” and the movie's hook, is not that it's about Celine Dion by another name, but the decision made by the film’s co-writer and director, Valérie Lemercier, who stars as Aline, to play the character … at every age. Which means that Lemercier, in her late 50s, plays Aline as a toddler, a small child, a tween, a teenager, a young woman, a mother and a middle-aged woman. How, pray tell, does she pull this off? By pasting Lemercier’s digitally airbrushed visage onto a child actor, or simply just shrinking her down. It's bold choice, but there’s no amount of movie magic to make Lemercier actually look like a small child, and so young Aline is shot almost exclusively in extreme wide shots. It’s a bafflingly surreal viewing experience, and a choice that keeps the viewer simultaneously completely out of the story, but compulsively watching nevertheless, as it's simply astonishing to witness.
