French adore Céline-inspired Aline, American critics are stumped

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Céline Dion is a huge hit with English and French-speaking fans, but it seems the Céline-inspired movie Aline is doing better in the Francophone world.

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The eccentric biopic co-written, directed and starring Valérie Lemercier has garnered rave reviews from critics in France and is already a box office success there. Aline, a Franco-Québec co-production, had its North American premiere at the Théâtre Maisonneuve de Place des Arts on Tuesday and then opens in Quebec on Thursday. Lemercier is a well-known French actress, comedian and director.

But the American film critics who saw Aline when she had her world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July shook their heads, sounding very confused. What puzzled them was Lemercier’s unusual decision to play the character of Dion at every stage of his life, even when he was five years old!

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Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times wrote that: “The movie is like Bohemian Rhapsody if they shrunk Rami Malek and made him play his own teeth.” Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson wrote : “What Lemercier does in Aline is a total shock, one of the strangest approaches to a biopic I’ve seen so far.”

In an interview at a downtown hotel on Monday, Lemercier didn’t seem overly concerned that Aline seemed to be once again proving the existence of the two solitudes.

“It’s just that the French know me,” Lemercier said. “If the French see me playing a five-year-old, it makes them laugh because they know I’ve done this before. Even before they see the movie, they know it will be fun. While English speakers, since they don’t know me at all, they probably have a harder time understanding that I play it at all ages. It really doesn’t look like your classic biopic made in America. It’s weirder. “

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The film begins with a disclaimer stating: “This film is inspired by the life of Céline Dion. However, it is a work of fiction ”. It is not officially sanctioned by the field of Dion and, in fact, the main character of the film, played by Lemercier, is called Aline Dieu. Her manager and eventually husband is not René Angélil, but a guy who looks and sounds like Angélil named Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel).

The French movie is full of Dion hits in English and French, but they are not Dion’s originals. The songs are sung by French singer Victoria Sio. So it’s Céline but not Céline. There’s a nudge, nudge, wink, wink thing here. When Guy-Claude first meets the singer when he was 12 years old, he mistakenly calls her Céline and they say: “No, it’s not Céline, it’s Aline.”

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Perhaps the craziest scene is when Lemercier plays Aline as a five-year-old girl singing at a family wedding. Many media reports say that Lemercier’s face was digitally edited on the body of a child actor, but she is quick to note that it is actually all of her and that her body was reduced to preschool size in post-production.

The other aspect that seems to disturb English viewers is the age difference between Aline and Guy-Claude. Like Dion and Angélil, there are 26 years that separate them, which means he was 30 when he first met her at 12. The movie makes it clear that Aline soon fell madly in love with this older man, who mirrors real life. history. Lemercier dismisses the controversy over the age difference.

“They first kissed when she was 20 years old,” Lemercier said. “It is she who falls in love. She is the one who finally gets it at age 20. What do you want? I am also in a love story that involves a great age difference, in the other sense. Exists. It is a love story that you are allowed to live. I hope we see in the film that at first he does not want it, that he resists … It is a great love story ”.

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Lemercier says she likes the fact that Dion is a bit of a clown and that the film brings out that aspect of Dion’s personality, the side of the diva that draws her into relationships with late-night American talk show hosts and journalists who they ask him. about his personal life.

Dion has yet to see the movie. His manager in France saw it and told Lemercier: “I can’t show it to Céline. She will cry. “

Lemercier still hopes Dion will see him. His son René-Charles has requested a print and the filmmaker would love Angélil’s adult children to see it.

“I told my producer, you have to see this movie because it’s a movie about your father,” Lemercier said.

“I’m not afraid of the critics’ reaction, I’m afraid of Céline’s reaction,” Lemercier said. “I want to know how your heart reacts.”

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