Aline is the weirdest biopic not about Celine Dion

Roadside Attractions

Where do I begin with this movie? I am still trying to get my jaw off the floor and wrap my brain around what I witnessed.  

So, the story centers around the Dieu family in Quebec, Canada. There are about 127 of them (okay, 14 kids and their parents) living under one roof. The kids, whose ages are difficult to determine because of the crazy makeup and wildly inappropriate ages of the actors playing them, have formed a family band and are very popular in the area. The irony here is that the father Anglomard (Roc LaFortune) originally didn’t want children, and wife Sylvette (Danielle Fichaud) thinks after twenty-some years that they are done with babies. And then along comes Aline, who at five years of age stuns an audience with her mature voice. Flash forward seven years (there’s a lot of rapid forward motion in this movie and you often have no idea what year it is) and Sylvette is convinced Aline is a star in the making so she writes a song, and one of her older brothers, Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vézina), writes the music and produces a demo tape to send to a record executive whose clients have all but abandoned him. When they hear nothing back, Jean-Bobin calls and reminds him that he needs to listen to the tape and once he does he will call the Dieus back in ten minutes. He does and they set up a meeting where thirtysomething Guy-Claude Kamar first meets the 12-year-old Celine … erm, Aline (as her mother sternly reminds him). Next thing you know, she’s being booked on local television and cutting an album which is apparently a best seller in the Vatican (which becomes a major joke as the family members say ‘the Vatican’ a couple of dozen times). Aline rapidly ages again and she’s now touring the world, with her mother in town, but there is a major complication — Aline is in love with the much older Guy-Claude and Mama Dieu won’t have any of it, doing all she can to make sure the old man never lays a hand on her daughter. Aline is entered into an ‘international singing contest’ but her heart just can’t go on without Guy-Claude, and despite Sylvette’s best intentions, the two fall in love and live their fairytale romance.

So, yeah, this is basically the life story of Celine Dion but it isn’t Celine Dion … even though all of Celine Dion’s songs are used in the movie (not sung by Celine Dion but a really good impersonation by Victoria Sio). And that just makes Aline even more bonkers than it already is. The project was born out of the mind of star/writer/director Valérie Lemercier who didn’t just want to do a standard biopic and used every biographical moment from her life to turn Celine into Aline. The problem when watching the film is that you don’t know if this is meant to be an earnest story about a woman is is exactly like Celine Dion, or if it’s meant to parody those earnest musical biopics like Coal Miner’s Daughter. It’s more like a spoof of The Rose which was about Janis Joplin but wasn’t, except that one was deadly serious. Further blurring the lines are the inclusion of Celine’s most notable moments and faithful recreations of some of her more well-known outfits including the wedding gown Dion was roasted for (but not that backwards suit … how could they have omitted that backwards suit?!?!).

Further adding to the confusion is the fact that Lemercier insisted on casting herself as Aline … from the age of FIVE until the present, with her nearly 57-year-old face either pasted on to a child’s body, or interacting with sets and props that were made larger to make her appear smaller. Scenes of her with just the top of her head popping up over the edge of a table are unintentionally (or intentionally?) hilarious. I don’t know what the budget was on this movie, but they didn’t spend enough on the digital de-aging because 12-year-old Aline looks every bit the age of Lemercier, which really takes the audience into the ‘uncanny valley’. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the effect because it’s a little terrifying. On the other hand, once Aline is in her late teens, it looks like they made the set smaller to make her look taller and the effect is like Gandalf inside Bilbo Baggins’ house. And oddly enough, she looks younger when she’s older! While all of these decisions are highly questionable, I have to hand it to Lemercier for at least giving a decent performance, really nailing all of Dion’s mannerisms when she’s performing and managing to keep a straight face the rest of the time.

Sylvain Marcel is also good as René … I mean Guy-Claude. Apparently he was taking the role rather seriously, attempting to do an accurate impression of René Angélil but reminded that he was Guy-Claude. The real problem here is that the movie wants you to root for the budding romance between a thirtysomething, married man and a 12-year-old child, even if it seems like Guy-Claude isn’t showing any interest. We know the whole real life story, so depicting it here as Aline always looks at Guy-Claude with her doe eyes is a bit unsettling. Danielle Fichaud’s performance as mom Sylvette is also very strong, and like Marcel she often takes her more dramatic scenes very seriously. But for most of the movie all I could think about when she was onscreen was that she was playing Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances.

There is a plot point in the film that has Aline and Guy-Claude buying a huge estate in Las Vegas during her five-year residency and there are additional houses for each of her siblings and their families, as well as one for her parents. But we never really see more than a couple of the siblings, who basically cook, clean and babysit her kids, with Jean-Bobin being the most prominent throughout the story, sort of her tour/stage manager. As the complete opposite of Marcel and Fichaud, Antoine Vézina seems to be treating this more as a comedy, almost always mugging is way through a scene. He does have a couple of more sedate moments but he often appears to be in a different movie.

Doing a little research while writing, I learned the budget for the film was around $25 million. While that may not have been spent on CGI, you can certainly see it all in the film’s production design, from her childhood home to the mega-mansion to the large stages Aline performs on. It is not a cheaply made film by any means (and one has to wonder exactly how much was paid to use all of those songs, particularly ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from Titanic). I know it sounds like I’m completely slamming the film, but I’m not. I’m just baffled by what it was supposed to be. If Lemercier was going to go so far as to change Celine to Aline to give her some wiggle room in the storytelling, then she should have just gone full-on spoof, something like Walk Hard which mercilessly skewered musical biopics like Ray and Walk the Line. Aline wants to be reverent to the person it’s depicting but not reverent enough, leaving the audience to guess whether they should be laughing or not. I’m still not sure, but the one thing that Lemercier and company have succeeded in doing is burning this movie into my brain, and I’m sure I will be telling people about it for some time to come. I guess, then, that you could call the movie a success. Just don’t call it Celine.

Aline has a run time of 2 hours 6 minutes, is rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief language, and is in French with English subtitles.