'Aline' is an unauthorized and lightly fictionalized musical bio-pic of the singer Celine Dion, but they can't use her name so here she's called 'Aline Dieu'. This French-Canadian production is co-written by, directed, and stars Valérie Lemercier, the 57 year old plays her character form the ages of 6 to 48 by way of somewhat disconcerting visual effects. Truly a labor of love this big budget fan film is an extremely earnest hagiography of the Quebec born super star. It is ridiculous but it is also (in my estimation) the greatest bad musical bio-pic ever made.
There is something inherently campy and outsized about Celine Dion's life, so I find it hard to imagine a better bio-pic about her. The film is bizarre, a truly unique vision, yet also extremely conventional in structure and employing the clichés of it's genre. Celine never had a drinking or drug problem, nor apparently was she difficult to work with, so the main conflicts of the picture are infertility issues, a multi month period where he voice gave out, and the 26 year age difference between her and the love of her life producer she'd known since she was 12. Extremely difficult to rate, this a sublime film, so off kilter that it achieves a kind of greatness. Somewhere between 1 1/2 and 4 stars.
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