Aline will hit theaters on April 8, 2022.
A bizarre movie that unfortunately devolves into a boring one, Aline follows French Canadian singer Aline Dieu — Céline Dion in all but name — from her birth to present day. If that sounds like a bog-standard musical biopic, that’s because it is, but its major wrinkle is that its nearly 60-year-old director, Valérie Lemercier, plays the celebrated artist at every stage of her life, starting from the age of 5. Lemercier is a self-professed fan of Dion’s, so the whole production comes off like a deeply misguided act of dedication, where the line between worship and self-worship blurs as thoroughly as the line between any two eras in Dieu’s adult life, each connected by random time jumps, but each left feeling largely indecipherable from the last.
Lemercier, who co-wrote the screenplay with Brigitte Buc, is so keen on mythologizing Dion that she begins her story in 1932, a full 36 years before the artist was even born. There’s a certain charm to the “rags” segment of this “rags-to-riches” story, owed mostly to Dieu’s enormous family and the incredibly personable actors playing them — her parents, Sylvette (Danielle Fichaud) and Anglomard (Roc Lafortune); her music industry brother, Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vézina); and her 12 other older siblings — but things take a remarkably strange turn when the singer enters the picture. Lemercier’s adult face pops up from beneath a makeshift stage, replete with a terrifying grin, as a quick cut to a reverse shot reveals a child body-double, à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.
It’s the first and last time there’s any meaningful artistry to the illusion — or at least, artistry that isn’t horrendously distracting. As if the film were slowly teasing its uncanny main event, we’re next treated to wide shots of Dieu singing as a child, each one getting slightly closer, each cut threatening to reveal more of Lemercier’s unsettling transformation: her 55-year-old head pasted digitally onto the torso of a preschooler. During this section, the few scenes in which the director shows up in her own body employ another trick from the Peter Jackson handbook — the forced perspective which allowed a seemingly miniature Elijah Wood to share the screen with an enormous Ian McKellan — but the staging and camera work are so haphazard that it only ever looks like Sylvette and Anglomard are refusing to look directly at their monstrosity of a child. It would be one thing if Lemercier were telling a story of a kid frequently mocked for her appearance, but this is one element of Dion’s mythology the director chooses to omit. In her eyes, Dieu (which, incidentally, means “God” in French) is a vessel for her to worship Dion from afar, despite stepping into her shoes.
The long-term narrative impact of her decision to play Dieu at all ages is even stranger. For one thing, while every other character ages significantly over the years — thanks to some commendable make-up — Dieu only really changes in size. For another, it leaves the central plot feeling particularly unsavory. Like Dion, who first met her significantly older husband and manager, René Angélil, when she was 12, Dieu first meets Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel) when she looks like a small and creepy adult a bit too caught up in schoolgirl roleplay. Guy-Claude, therefore, comes off creepier still, because despite the objections of Dieu’s mother when the rising star turns 20, the film’s perspective is most often a distant presentation of publicly available info about Dion, all from a present vantage. Each story beat is little more than a Tetris piece, whose purpose is to slot neatly into the flat jigsaw puzzle that is Dion’s successful and highly publicized tale, so from the moment Guy-Claude is introduced, the inevitable outcome of romance looms large.
Despite playing the leading role, there’s little intimacy to the way Lemercier films herself in the singer’s later years. Once her childish affectations are mercifully left behind — for the first of the film’s two hours, there’s little difference between the put-on naiveté she applies to Dieu at 5 or 25 — most of the character’s adult drama behind the scenes is relegated to either profile shots, or scenes where Dieu isn’t even on screen. Major life events, like pregnancies, illnesses, births, and deaths, become flattened into narrative inconveniences, delivered largely through snippets and implications rather than meaningful drama, as if Lemercier is afraid to show real emotion as her pop music idol.
There are occasional exceptions, like when Dieu tears up during an interview, or cracks from the pressure of her touring schedule and breaks down on stage. These fleeting plot points are taken from Dion’s true story, and they seem to inadvertently reveal Lemercier’s fatal flaw in trying to tell this story. Real life, in Aline, is what happens backstage, and its importance pales in comparison to the bright lights, and the life Dion has lived in the public eye. The only problem is that Lemercier strings together even these moments in the spotlight with a similar lack of interest in real feelings. French singer Victoria Sio does a fantastic impression as Dion’s singing voice, but no moment in Dieu’s professional career ever feels like a rousing success in which she revels, or a major hurdle for her to overcome. Rather, they’re things that happen to her, or around her. Her place in her own story is a passive one, though not in a way that meaningfully overlaps with the subplot about her lack of agency in determining her schedule. Every major life event occurs in isolation, with little impact on Dieu as a person from scene to scene. Its only relevance is where in time it happened to coincide with her discography; not since the 2017 Tupac biopic All Eyez on Me has a musician’s big-screen story felt this much like an adaptation of their Wikipedia page.
For every bit of competent filmmaking — for every delightful moment where Dieu’s family lights up in surprise, or their faces fall in disappointment, and the camera’s inward or outward motion matches their mood — there are a dozen more decisions that might lead one to question Lemercier’s basic understanding of visual language. At a time in Dieu’s life where her vocal cords need rest, and she communicates by writing on napkins instead of speaking, the director portrays the scale of this ordeal via a montage of a pile of napkins reducing in size. And yet, she uses similar techniques to denote the passage of time during happier moments too, like when Dieu gets pregnant, gives birth, and raises a child. Beyond a point, every event in Dieu’s life is presented with the exact same matter of fact-ness; the result, in the words of the great Macho Man Randy Savage, is that nothing means nothing despite Dion being the cream of the crop. Even her rise to international fame, thanks to “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, seems to whiz by in the background.
It takes a good hour and 45 minutes for Lemercier to introduce a mildly interesting dramatic idea — that Dieu, while performing on stage, has her music in one ear piece and her husband in the other — and the director visualizes this duality in particularly thoughtful fashion, from Guy-Claude’s point of view, at a difficult moment in the couple’s life. However, the concept only works when divorced from the larger film, because so little of the story is actually told from Dieu’s perspective to begin with, despite her near-constant presence on screen, that this scene is similarly flattened into homogenous, meaningless goop like everything else.
Aline’s first half hour may be morbidly fascinating, but ultimately, it’s just another musical biopic that Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story already parodied years in advance.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/BVw5jof
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