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.
You have to admire Lemercier’s guts and willingness to do this, which has not gone unrecognized, as she won the Cesar Award (the French Oscar) for best actress for her performance. Once the film catches up with Aline’s adulthood, Lermercier does give quite a good impression of Celine Dion’s signature antics, her awkward lanky dances and chest-thumping performances, and the back half of “Aline” is a straightforward biopic, rather than an utterly transfixing cinematic science experiment gone wrong.
It’s obvious that Lemercier has a great affection and respect for Celine Dion, and she wants to do right by her with this film, which is as wacky, inadvertently hilarious and charming as the woman herself. It’s pure camp, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. The storytelling is often odd; the editing choices are sometimes wonky, the tone is all over the place. But “Aline,” which starts with the marriage of Aline’s parents and ends with the death of her husband/manager Guy-Claude (the Rene Angelil character) played by Sylvain Marcel, is fundamentally a story about love.
One of the oft-used songs is “Let’s Talk About Love,” the name of her 1997 album, and that may be because the rights to the other songs may have been harder to pin down, but that song ends up becoming a thesis of sorts for the film. It glosses over many of the landmark moments of Dion’s career (Eurovision, “Titanic,” etc.) and remains laser-focused on the love story between Aline and Guy-Claude. The nearly 30-year age gap between the young singer and her manager, whom she met at the age of 12, is overcome by their sincere love for each other, and Lermercier places the emphasis on Aline’s agency in their relationship, and Guy-Claude’s respect for her desires.
“Aline” is a deeply strange film, but a compelling one, which needs to be seen to be believed. But it’s also deeply heartfelt and absolutely, unabashedly in love with love, and in love with Celine Dion, and her own love story. It's a film that's at least worth talking about.
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‘ALINE’
2.5 stars (out of 4)
In French with English subtitles
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some suggestive material and brief language)
Running time: 2:08
Where to watch: In theaters Friday
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