We need to talk about the bizarre, unauthorized Celine Dion biopic
57-year-old actor Valérie Lemercier plays a fictionalized version of the singer at multiple ages—including 5 and 12
Film News céline dion
A few times a year, a new music legend gets their own biopic. We’ve seen enough to know that they all follow a nearly identical narrative of how the artist went from being a nobody to a star, complete with that magical moment in the studio where it all seemingly instantly came together, sprinkled with some sex and tragedy. But the unauthorized Celine Dion biopic that premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday said “fuck conformity” and decided to go a very strange route.
You might be asking yourself “So what could be so weird about a Celine Dion biopic?” Turns out a lot. First of all, given how it’s unauthorized, the film pulls a Jackie Jormp-Jorp. It’s called Aline, and it’s about a singer named Aline Dieu who just happens to have the same life story as the iconic Canadian singer—including falling in love with the much-older manager who she met as a preteen. But let’s get to the truly “WTF” aspect of it: 57-year-old director, producer, and star Valérie Lemercier plays Aline at multiple stages of the character’s life. We haven’t seen the film yet, but the trailer makes the age thing look downright unsettling.
The trailer spares us from getting to see Lemercier play a 5-year-old, because people still need to shell out on the movie out of sheer curiosity. But we do get to see Lemercier as a 12-year-old. It’s utterly strange. Her face looks very grown up (with wrinkles digitally removed), but her body’s made to look more petite compared to the adults onscreen. It gives the vibes of an adult passing herself off to be a child in a horror movie.
Don’t worry, Lemercier is fully in on the joke. The actor, who Variety Executive Editor Ramin Setoodeh dubbed “the Kristen Wiig of France,” didn’t want to make a serious biopic. The actor is also known for playing characters who are children, so it somehow works—to the extent that the film received a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes. But as The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan wrote in his review, “practically speaking, that means we’re watching a 57-year-old play a 12-year-old with a crush on her 40-year-old manager. I just don’t know what to do with any of that! Every time Aline’s mother tries to sever the union, declaring that Guy-Claude is far too old for Aline, I felt like my brain was short-circuiting.” But it all works in the movie’s favor, because now nobody can stop talking about it.
65 Comments
Maximum hilarity is only achieved if the guy playing the 40-year-old manager is either 10 or 100. Either will do.
Et voilà, l’histoire de… Jackie Jormp-Jomp!
It could be worse. It could be a 12 year old actress professing a crush on her 40 year old manager.
At least it would be realistic since that’s basically what happened in real life.
In the scenes where she’s 12 I’m getting a lot of Martin Short – Clifford vibes.
That movie is so fucking creepy.
Apparently the actress is fairly tall as well, like 5’10”, which makes it even creepier because a smaller actress might look slightly less off putting because there’s less you have to do.
The story itself is off putting so I doubt any type of casting would make it seem less ick.
It looks like the movie has a decent budget, too! How many people thought this was a good idea??!
It’s a comedy that embraces being weird and campy. As far as biopics go it’s probably much more like Walk Hard than Bohemian Rhapsody. I haven’t seen it of course but on the surface this outrage seems like someone incredulously describing a surreal Tim and Eric sketch like they thought they were doing straight drama.
pass.
Another stupid thing about this is that the main actress isn’t even trying to do a French-Canadian accent (she’s French), whereas most of the other actors in the film appear to be native Quebecois.
That’s like making a Britney Spears biopic and letting Kate Winslet talk like she’s hanging out in a Berkshire pub.
“a Britney Spears biopic and letting Kate Winslet talk like she’s hanging out in a Berkshire pub.”…continue.
Which particular Berkshire pub did you have in mind? I need specifics.
Wait, what ? She’s clearly doing the accent, and it sounds good to my French ear. Maybe a true Québécois would tell you the accent is somewhat off a bit in some places (I can’t speak for them). But in any case you can’t say she isn’t trying.
She also made a movie where the plot is ‘a racist White woman becomes…Black.’
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/agathecleryA real fucking gem that woman is…
It always bothered me just how much the movie Soul Man was shown on OTA UHF channels in the late 80s early 90s, to say nothing that it never should’ve been made at all, and torpedoed the blossoming career of C. Thomas Howell.
You know, I just had this really weird experience in which I had to walk away from some Producers for this microbudgeted movie I was making because they kept on insisting on blackface.
Like the film had nothing to do with blackface either. It was about teenage girl hypnotists fighting each other.
That premise sounds a) really interesting and b) like it could easily be done without blackface.
Thanks.It was just one of those experiences that was so bewildering that I feel the need to talk about it with others. Make sure I’m not the crazy one.
Yeah, just hire a black actress or Quantum Leap it with the white actress.
Howell has 220 acting credits in IMDb. Pretty good career me thinks.
You should hear Lou Reed’s version of “Soul Man” that was on the soundtrack. It’s a nightmare. Reed had to have known it was ridiculous.
“‘a racist White woman becomes…Black.’”Oh, so she did a Rachel Dolezal biopic as well?
No, it’s a libellous Lois Lane biopic:
This is cringe but at the same time was probably incredibly progressive for its time.
“I Am Curious (Black)“ is, bewilderingly, a reference to “I Am Curious (Yellow)”, a controversial Swedish erotic drama which, yes, concerns a young woman’s search for understanding about social justice, but also contained what was, for the time, a LOT of frank sex (some allegedly unsimulated) and nudity, and not really what you’d expect your typical ‘Lois Lane, Superman’s Girlfriend’ reader to have context for…
But she didn’t get the rights to the music.
And? It was ahead of its time. White woman suddenly has to face the racism that a black women does daily was about 20 years before anyone was even addressing that, particularly in cosmetics. It’s certainly far from a perfect movie as far as it addressed racism, but it’s a million times better than other comedies dared to in 2008.
First of all, bullshit. Racial switcharoos are a very old storytelling tradition. Second of all, if you honestly don’t see what is wrong with this approach here than you are just too far gone to be educated at this point. I mean, tge article itself talks about how the woman is known as a comedian ffs. Pointed social commentary this clearly was fucking NOT.
First of all, bullshit. Racial switcharoos are a very old storytelling tradition.Doesn’t mean it does no harm if there’s a power imbalance between the races. I suspect that most of the ones seeing no harm are not the race being mocked.the woman is known as a comedian ffs. Pointed social commentary this clearly was fucking NOT.Her being a comedian won’t stop racists from using it as a form of racial degradation.
How would you have any insight into this what so ever?
And? It was ahead of its time.In 2008? Uh no, no it wasn’t.Heck, the issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane where Lois Lane became black came out in 1970. Not only is 2008 not “ahead of its time,” the image of a woman in blackface is far, far behind the times.
Could do it without parading around in black face.
‘a racist White woman becomes…Black.’
Sounds like we’re supposed to laugh at the racist white woman for getting her comeuppance.
It’d still be a problematic film to be shown in America, but it’s French so why does that make her “a real fucking gem”?
The blackface would be a terrible decision regardless, but fuck is it also distractingly terrible looking. How come movies can convincingly make someone look green or blue and they look normal but the make-up used for the central premise of this movie just makes her look inhuman. And ohmygod I just noticed in one of those pictures she’s doing Michael Jackson dance moves, hooboy.
She looks about as convincing in blackface as the Wayans brothers did in whiteface.
TIL that Agathe Clery is French for Dee Reynolds.
Sounds like the same basic plot as 1970’s The Watermelon Man.
They didn’t have Tom Hanks as a kid in BIG, they could have easely put in a real black woman with “similar features”. This looks so awful.
There was a movie called “Watermelon Man” with exactly that premise, but gender swapped
I got an Illuminatus! Trilogy notification for this?
How do we get these notifications?
Dorf on Dion
I don’t think we really *need* to talk about it.
I need it. I really, really need it.
Astonishingly, AVClub is using the same “We Need To…” headline as the NYTimes for this post?https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/movies/cannes-aline-celine-dion.htmlLike, I get that this site just aggregates the work of other sites, but not writing your own headline is a new level of laziness.
Yeah, she tried to draw the sting by citing the article, but this is a heavy duty ripoff, Jackie Jormp-Jomp reference and all. It’s not that hard, if you can’t do as well as the NYT, do worse, but don’t pass off someone else’s work as your own.
Has anyone seen the 1978 movie The Greek Tycoon? It was a movie that clearly was about the the relationship and eventual marriage of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, but hid the characters under pseudonyms. The writeup of this Dion movie reminds me of that. It’s odd in this era. I get the fig leaf of not-necessarily flattering biopics of living people hiding behind pseudonyms, but, for example, The Social Network didn’t hide that it was about Zuckerberg, so I thought we were beyond that.
I haven’t seen it, but I remember it. It was made for TV, as I recall. I was eleven, so Ari Onassis’ and Jackie O’s thinly veiled lives did not interest me at all.
Nah, we don’t.
My bong and I will be watching this.
Several weeks ago, my notifications stopped taking me directly to my comment. I have to scroll through everything to find my responses. Is this happening to anybody else?? It makes it impossible to discuss anything if you don’t have time to sit there and scroll, looking for your name. Plus, it’s driving me nuts.
Yeah, same. May have been around the same time that it started mangling any comments containing links.
I think it is happening to all of us.It sucks.As does Kinja.
I was never on here before Kinja. I see people complaining about it, but I don’t know anything about the previous system.
Before Kinja there was Disqus. It works pretty well, and also allows downvotes. It’s used on a lot of websites. Before Disqus there was a proprietary commenting system. It worked. I can’t remember why the change was made to Disqus. The change from Disqus was not a popular one. Lots of really good commenters left forever.When the switch was made to Disqus people were pissed. Now we pine for the days of Disqus.Disqus also gave you the option to choose to get an email notification when you got a reply, or a daily email digest of the replies to your comments.
I’m sure they changed to Disqus so they no longer had to pay someone to maintain the comment system. I kind of miss the Wild West days of not even having to register to comment and coming up with different alias personas but I don’t think that would stand up to how brutal the world of commenting is today. Kinja is fucking garbage. The mysterious and very elitist way you’re stuck in the “greys” until some unquantifiable magic brings you out is the absolute worst.
Disqus was a pain because it couldn’t really handle comment threads that were thousands of comments long. Kinja solved that by driving away enough commenters that the problem never arises.
It’s been doing this to me for the past month
The actor is also known for playing characters who are children This sounds extraordinarily French.
“director, producer, star…”Oh. That actually explains everything.