Aline: The Bizarre Celine Tribute Film that Flummoxed Cannes Hits English Canada
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-plus
Esthetically perched somewhere between a low-budget TV biopic and a soap opera - with occasional flourishes of bonkers-cheesiness worthy of cult status - Aline is the Celine Dion hagiography no one could have dreamed up except its director.
That director, Valérie Lemercier, had the chutzpah to cast herself as the Celine character, Aline Dieu, at every age from 5 to 50 (you read that right). There’s plenty of digital de-aging going on, of course, but it’s not the cheesiest thing in this movie, which is making its way through English Canada (see below) in an ad hoc chain of independent theatres (Cineplex apparently gave it a pass)..
Aline, which debuted at Cannes to jaw-dropping “WTF?” reaction, is actually entertaining on its own weird level for its first half. That begins with Anglomard Dieu (Roc Lafortune), a young rural Quebecer who woos his wife Sylvette (Danielle Fichaud) with the condition that they never have children. Naturally, they end up with 14 of them.
The mob of kids end up, also naturally, as a singing group, the youngest of whom, Aline, is so shy she hides under a table at a wedding, but is coaxed to sing a roof-shaking cover of the ‘70s French hit pop song Mamy Blue.
The use of pop songs whose rights the producers could afford is another weird trademark of Aline. Nature Boy, the Nat King Cole hit sung by David Bowie in Moulin Rouge, is “their song” for Aline and her much older manager Guy-Claude (Sylvain Marcel). It plays instrumentally at least a half-dozen times in the movie. At the point where the teen Aline begins to realize she is in love with Guy-Claude, she stares at his picture and Janis Ian’s At Seventeen plays (meanwhile, in another shot, we see Guy-Claude staring at pictures of her). Neither of these songs is really relevant to the love story, but hey.
Aline and Guy-Claude are, of course, meant to represent Celine and her eventual husband René Angélil. Given that Angelil represented her from age 12, there was always gossipy speculation about when the manager-client relationship deepened. Fichaud’s best moments occur when she plays the rampaging mother, enraged at the inappropriate affair, calling Guy-Claude “fatso” and saying things like, “My princess should marry a prince, not someone divorced twice and two times her age.”
Aline is so awkward at presenting this love story, that it’s fascinating to watch, in a car crash sort of way.
Otherwise, Aline is prosaic in presentation and in its dully chronologically told tale (it’s the kind of movie where someone will suddenly break into tears, then look up and say, “I’m sad.”)
We know Aline is frustrated in her desire to have a baby from all the scenes with a pregnancy tester (the little blue “sad face” appears enough times to get a supporting actor nomination).
On the occasions when she does get pregnant, it’s telegraphed by her gobbling her meals and stealing food from other people’s plates.
As Aline onstage, Lemercier (her voice dubbed by soprano Victoria Sio) is a passable Celine Dion tribute act, but doesn’t hit quite the genuine star’s stagey emotionality in her moves (hit that chest harder!)
In presentation, one performance is staged like another. What’s supposed to be Eurovision looks a lot like the Oscars (the movie paid enough that we get snippets of hits like My Heart Will Go On and All By Myself). There’s a sameness to Aline’s life onstage that might generously be taken as an artistic statement.
It is very late in Aline before Lemercier tries to cobble together a moral to the story, when we discover that after a lifetime of wanting to be a superstar, she has never left her Vegas casino and walked around the Strip in all the time she’s spent living there.
It is a bit of lonely pathos that comes out of left field, given that Aline has spent little time trying to connect emotional dots during its entire two-hours-and-change of narrative.
Aline. Written and directed by Valérie Lemercier. Starring Valérie Lemercier, Sylvain Marcel and Danielle Fichaud. Now playing in Regina, Saskatoon,Victoria and Red Deer. Opening Friday, Feb. 4 in Hamilton and Feb. 11 in Ottawa and Kapuskasing. Opening Feb. 18 in Toronto at the Fox Theatre.