Review: 'Aline' is a weird, and oddly touching, fictional biography 'freely inspired' by the life of Celine Dion

The French comic actress and filmmaker Valérie Lemercier has invented something new with “Aline”: A fictional musical biopic that’s more true to its subject than a documentary would be. And that’s not the weirdest part of this fan letter to one of the world’s biggest singing stars.

We don’t meet the title character of Aline Dieu right away. First, Lemercier, as director and co-writer (with Brigitte Buc), introduces us to her parents, Sylvette and Anglomard, as they fall in love, marry, vow not to have children — and then proceed to raise a family of 14 kids, with Aline the youngest, with a sock drawer as her crib.

The Dieu children, growing up in a small house in Quebec in the 1970s, form a singing group — and eventually the family learns little Aline has the most beautiful, and most powerful, voice of all. Her parents (Danielle Michaud and Roc Lafortune) and older brother Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vézina) record a demo tape of Aline at age 12, and send it to a record producer, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel).

If you’re up on your Quebecois-born megastars, you may have deduced that this all sounds like the life story of Celine Dion. Lemercier makes no bones about that: There’s an opening title card saying the film is “inspired by the life” of Dion, but told as fiction. Why Lemercier changed the names of the main figures is never fully explained, as the plot points match as closely to Dion’s life as the scripts for “Walk the Line” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” or most any Hollywood-produced biopic does of their subjects.

But the bigger mystery comes when Lemercier, who’s 58, appears as Aline at age 12 — through a combination of forced-perspective angles, body doubles and computerized face-swapping. The effect is eerie, in an uncanny-valley sort of way, and darn near takes us out of the narrative.

That narrative continues with Kamar becoming Aline’s manager and guiding her early career. After some success with French songs, for audiences in Quebec and Paris, Aline follows Kamar’s advice to take a break, fix her crooked teeth, and learn English so she can conquer the American and British markets — and, eventually, the world.

As the teen Aline becomes a rising star in Europe, she also falls deeply in love with Kamar, who is more than twice her age, and twice divorced. Kamar, with Mama Sylvette watching like a hawk, does the gentlemanly thing and avoids giving any indication that he reciprocates Aline’s feelings. After winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest at age 20, Aline is old enough to act on her feelings — and Kamar finally admits that he loves her, too.

Kamar is a stand-in for Dion’s real-life husband/manager, René Angélil — and the movie follows the version of the story Dion tells in her autobiography, holding that he resisted her advances until she was of age. Having Lemercier and Marcel, who were born in the same year, play the roles doesn’t make it feel less weird, especially when Lemercier is playing Aline between 17 and 21 in those scenes.

The rest of the movie hits the high points of Celine, er, Aline’s life: World tours, years in Vegas, battles against infertility, a stretch where she has to rest her vocal cords, and the opportunity to sing a song for a movie about the Titanic. (In an amusing scene, Kamar plays the instrumental for the “Titanic” score, and a temporarily mute Aline writes on her pad, “I don’t like it.”)

Lemercier’s sincerity in depicting the larger-than-life story of a major pop star doesn’t keep her from embracing the kitschiness of such a life — the sequins, the limousines, the whole nine yards. Also, any movie that tells of a musician’s life, even a fictionalized take like this, must contend with the long shadow of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” which parodied all the cliches this movie employs without shame.

“Aline” can’t be dismissed, in part because the cast is so winning — particularly Marcel’s Kamar and Jean-Noël Brouté as Fred, Aline’s makeup artist and confidante. And a shout-out to Victoria Sio, who provides the singing voice to which Lemercier lip-syncs, belting out Celine-style covers of “All By Myself,” “River Deep / Mountain High” and other hits.

The driving force of “Aline,” in front of the camera and behind it, is Lemercier. Her past work as a director have all been light French comedies, and she sprinkles in some light-hearted moments (like when Aline gets lost in her own mansion), but keeps it serious when needed. Lemercier’s performance shows how completely she embraces Celine Dion, as a performer and an icon. Lemercier puts her whole heart into “Aline,” and that heart will go on.

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‘Aline’

★★★

Opening Friday, April 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief language. Running time: 126 minutes; mostly in French, with subtitles.