An unauthorised Céline Dion biopic has been confusing the crap out of audiences at the Cannes Film Festival.
The film, dubbed Aline, is a Rockstar-esque quasi-biopic that tells the story of a French-Canadian popstar whose journey closely mirrors that of real life diva, Céline Dion.
Straight off the bat, the wackiest part of the whole thing is that we’ve got a 57-year-old actress playing the role of a 5-year-old child. Yep, you read that right.
Writer-director-actor-singer Valérie Lemercier plays the singer at all stages of her life, including as a kindergartener. And, apparently, the results are rather terrifying.
Journalist Kyle Buchanan’s review for The New York Times sums it up in the following terms:
“Shrunk to Hobbit size and Facetuned into near-oblivion, Lemercier scampers, preens and unnerves. I’ve never seen anything quit like it: Not ‘PEN15’, not John C. Reilly at the beginning of ‘Walk Hard’, not even a fully grown Martin Short playing a psychotic 10-year-old in ‘Clifford’. As a cinematic presence, preteen Aline looks less like our main character and more like she’s ready to terrorise Vera Farmiga in the next ‘Conjuring’ movie.”
As to the actual quality of the film itself, critics seem pretty split.
As Junkee points out, Aline did cop a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes, but most of its reviewers seem unable to get over the bizarre casting approach.
Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair has dubbed it “one of the strangest approaches to a biopic I’ve yet seen”, while Peter Debruge of Variety summed up the flick as “an unabashedly corny homage” to Dion.
Sadly, we don’t yet have any clues about when it might be released here in Australia.
But for now, you can peep the trailer below.
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