Just FYI, Aline Is Probably Supposed to Be Celine Dion
The "unofficial" Celine Dion biopic gives its subject a different name, but I know this story
EntertainmentMoviesIt’s awards season, which means it is also biopic season, and if you haven’t gotten your fill of famous people pretending to be other famous people yet by way of Spencer, might I draw your attention to this movie about a person not named Celine Dion, but whose story sure does look and sound a lot like Celine Dion’s life being acted out to songs by Celine Dion.
Officially the film—which nearly everyone at Cannes lost their shit for, by the way—is a fictional story about a person named “Aline Dieu.” Unofficially, it’s about a kooky French-Canadian with a big voice and an old husband who has a Las Vegas mansion so big she gets lost in it, which narrows down the list of people this could be about significantly.
In the film, a 57-year-old actor named Valérie Lemercier, who also directed, plays not-Celine-but-Aline from ages 5 through present-day, including the time not-Celine sang a song called “My Heart Will Go On” at the Oscars. Also, the movie, which is again, not about Celine Dion, only inspired by her, features a lot of other music by Celine Dion, a real person who did not happen to give filmmakers permission to use her name.
Reviewers who have seen this movie, which opens in America in January, cannot seem to explain, exactly, what is going on in Aline, a new trailer for which just dropped, though they can agree that it’s a lot.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” was the assessment given this film by the New York Times. “Even the film’s more straightforward dramatic scenes are still tinged with a bit of insanity.”And as Celine Dion is one of my favorite people in the universe for tinging literally everything she does and says with just a light smattering of the unhinged, I could not be more thrilled that a film forced to open with a disclaimer both distancing itself from her and directly invoking her also carries on her important legacy of somehow being both absurd and absurdly perfect.