How Valerie Lemercier channeled Celine Dion from age 5 to 50 in unauthorized biopic ‘Aline’
Valerie Lemercier wasn’t all that serious when she pledged during an interview to make her next film about Celine Dion. But the more the French comedian and filmmaker kept thinking about it, the more the pop diva’s life spoke to her.
“I always loved love stories,” she says over videoconference from an all-pink room in her country home in Normandy, France.
Borrowing liberally from Dion’s life, career and marriage to her decades-older manager, Rene Angelil, with just enough creative detours to claim artistic license, Lemercier directs herself in the musical drama “Aline” as Aline Dieu, who goes from the youngest of 14 in a close-knit French Canadian clan to world-famous chanteuse on the Last Vegas strip. Lemercier’s Dieu commands the screen with numbers pulled from the real-life Dion’s songbook, including “Let’s Talk About Love,” “All By Myself” and, yes, “My Heart Will Go On.”
“Celine couldn’t do a show without singing that song, which is a small jail,” says Lemercier, who mounted an exhaustive search to find a Dion vocal double in singer Victoria Sio, and lends a humorous spin to the “Titanic” moment in Aline’s fictional rise to stardom. “People want that one.”
The film grabbed headlines out of Cannes last year thanks to Lemercier’s many auteurist conceits, not the least of which is that the 58-year-old writer, director and star portrays Aline from ages 5 to 50. Using George Melies-inspired camera tricks and face-shrinking VFX, she plays the future
