When asked about “Aline,” her imaginary biopic of singer Celine Dion, French actress Valerie Lemercier replies in what seems like the most French way possible.
“I wanted to make a perfume of Celine’s life,” she says on a video call from her home in Paris. “She’s the real perfume, but I tried to be the perfume in Celine’s life.”
Lemercier, who stars as Aline and directed and co-wrote the film, is best known in France for the off-the-wall characters she’s played in comedies in movies, on television, and on stage.
But while “Aline” did get some unintentional laughs when it premiered at Cannes in 2021 – more on that in a moment – Lemercier plays her pseudo-Celine straight in the film, which opens Friday.
To her, the story of Celine Dion is the stuff of some of the singer’s biggest hits. It’s a love story, Lemercier says, describing how she reached that conclusion only after Dion’s husband-manager Rene Angelil died in 2016.
“When I saw Rene’s funeral, I was very touched by that lady,” Lemercier says. “The first steps alone. How will she continue?”
Lemercier says she couldn’t stop thinking about what Dion’s life would be like after the loss of Angelil, a man who had signed her as a client when she was still a child and years later married her in a romance that, to put it mildly, many didn’t understand.
The next few years she spent watching and reading everything she could find on Dion, and the more she learned, the more she saw a story she could tell.
“I didn’t know that love story was so strong, so unique, so special,” she says. “I said, ‘I will make a movie.’
“The love story seems the main thing of that life,” Lemercier says. “Love story with the mother and love story with him. Because she loved her mother, and she loved that man.
“For me, it was something important, the three main characters.”
Child’s play
In “Aline,” Lemercier plays Dion in every chapter of her life; that’s more literal than you might think.
She plays her as a child singing at a family wedding. As a 12-year-old meeting her manager and future husband for the first time. As a young star, a mother, and a grief-stricken wife approaching 50.
Lemercier was 55 when she shot the film, and it was the visuals of a young girl with a face that seemed uncannily mature, that set Cannes abuzz last summer. Not that the star and director paid that response any mind, or even seem to grasp why people found it, well, a bit odd.
“I played (her) early because when she was 12, she was an adult,” Lemercier says. “She wasn’t shy. She says, ‘I’m looking like a grandmother,’ when she saw a picture or video when she was 12. And it’s true.”
The age-shifting was done with a mix of practical and digital effects. Her desk in elementary school and her childhood bed were oversized props to make Lemercier look small against them. Her head and body were digitally shrunk.
“It’s not my old face put on the baby body,” she says. “Not at all. It’s me. I’m playing it with all my body, all my hands.
“And after they reduce me, all my body, they may grow the head a little bit, because only to reduce to the head would be too small,” Lemercier says.
Remarkably, this plays in “Aline” much less strange than the descriptions here might suggest. And if you trust the judgment of the French film industry, she was awarded the Cesar for best actress for her performance in the film, which received a total of 10 nominations including best director and best writer for Lemercier.
Art will go on
A movie about Dion couldn’t be made without the music she’s known for. And while the film wasn’t approved by Dion or her management, the fact that Dion almost exclusively records and performs songs written by other people left the door open for plenty of Dion’s biggest hits, including “My Heart Will Go On,” the theme song to “Titanic.” The recreation of performances on huge stages in flashy productions is impressive.
“The one that I was really, really surprised was ‘Love Me Tender’ of Elvis Presley,” Lemercier says of a song on her wish list that came through. “Rene, when he was 25, he’d been to the Elvis funeral. He was totally mad for Colonel Parker (Elvis’s manager), who was a model for Rene.”
“Ordinaire,” by the Quebecois songwriter Robert Charlebois, is heard at the start and the finish of the film. Lemercier says it’s the most important song in the movie for how it speaks to what she imagined Dion had felt after losing her husband.
The standard “Nature Boy” also surfaces throughout the film, serving as a theme for the love story of “Aline.”
“It’s in the song,” Lemercier says. “It’s ‘to love and be loved in return.’ They couldn’t do without love.”
The voice choice
Lemercier nails the kind of awkward intensity of Dion on stage, but she didn’t attempt to perform her vocals. A search that considered dozens of singers eventually landed on young French singer Victoria Sio, whose vocals sound close to how you remember Dion’s.
“There’d been 50 singers with a big level of singing,” Lemercier says. “For example, singers who could sing the very, very difficult song, “All By Myself.’
Sio ended up recording 16 songs for the film in a month and a half, with Lemercier coaching her like an actress in the studio.
“I wanted to hear the whole voice,” she explains. “When she was crying, she has to cry. I didn’t want only imitation parody of Celine.”
As for her physical performance, Lemercier says she worked to immerse herself into the character and channel her passion on stage for the concert scenes.
“I never watched the mirror,” she says. “When I was singing, I was 200% in my songs, and very happy to do it.”
A tribute
Dion has not commented on “Aline,” though a few members of her large family criticized the project. Lemercier says she believes the film is a loving portrait of a star, and the feedback she’s received from fans so far has been positive.
“I have a special relation with the Reddit fan club of Celine,” Lemercier says. “They’ve seen the movie and they were very happy with it. They know it’s nothing like exactly true, but the fans are happy with the movie.”
She says she understands that Dion might feel awkward watching a movie about her life that isn’t entirely as she has lived it. Still, Lemercier can dream.
“I understand, but I hope one time before my death she can look at it, and she can be able to watch it,” she says.
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